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Adam Cohen’s book “Imbeciles” details how Carrie Buck, shown here with her mother, Emma, in 1924, came to be at the center of a Supreme Court case that legalized forced sterilization for eugenic purposes. CREDITPHOTOGRAPH COURTESY ARTHUR ESTABROOK PAPERS, SPECIAL COLLECTIONS & ARCHIVES, UNIVERSITY AT ALBANY, SUNY
Carrie Buck was nobody you would have heard of. She was born in 1906 in Charlottesville, Virginia. Soon afterward, her father either abandoned the family or died—there’s no reliable record—leaving Carrie and her mother, Emma, in dire poverty. As a toddler, Carrie was taken in, with the approval of a municipal court, by a well-to-do couple, John and Alice Dobbs, who asked to become her foster parents after seeing Emma on the street. Carrie lived with the Dobbses and went to school through the sixth grade, after which they pulled her out of school so that she could do housework full time. She cleaned their house and was hired out to clean neighbors’ homes, until, at seventeen, she was discovered to be pregnant—she later said that she’d been raped, by Alice Dobbs’s nephew—at which point her guardians moved to have her declared mentally deficient, although there was no prior evidence that this was the case. They then had her committed to the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded.
When Carrie was sent to the Virginia Colony, in 1924, the forward thinkers of America were preoccupied by the imagined genetic threat of feeblemindedness, a capaciously defined condition that was diagnosed using often flawed intelligence tests and by identifying symptoms such as moral degeneracy, an overactive sex drive, and other traits liberally ascribed to poor people (especially poor women) who were seen as having stepped out of line. (Just a few years before Carrie was committed to the Virginia Colony, Emma was also sent there. It seems that she had turned to drug use and prostitution—although it’s hard to say, since many female vagrants were labelled prostitutes.) A sloppy reading of Gregor Mendel’s pea pods and Charles Darwin’s theories gave a scientific veneer to the conclusion that many social ills were caused by the proliferation of the wrong sort of people and that they could be neatly nipped in the bud with the intervention of eugenics—a term coined, in 1883, by Darwin’s half-cousin Francis Galton, who declared it “a virile creed, full of hopefulness.” Soon, the United States, along with Germany, was at the forefront of the movement to improve the human species through breeding. Scientific American ran articles on the subject, and the American Museum of Natural History hosted conferences. Theodore Roosevelt, Alexander Graham Bell, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and many other prominent citizens were outspoken supporters. Eugenics was taught in schools, celebrated in exhibits at the World’s Fair, and even preached from pulpits. The human race, one prominent advocate declared in 1909, was poised “to dry up the springs that feed the torrent of defective and degenerate protoplasm.”
The Virginia Colony was one of many facilities for the disabled that were founded in the Progressive Era, partly to provide care for a vulnerable population and partly to remove it from the gene pool, by sequestering those individuals during their fertile years. (On the other side of the coin, Jill Lepore has written about how modern marriage therapy grew out of one man’s effort to promote “fit” unions.) Between 1904 and 1921, the rate of institutionalization for feeblemindedness nearly tripled. Carrie was just one of this crowd, except that she happened to arrive at the Virginia Colony right at the moment when its superintendent, Dr. Albert Priddy, was looking to transform his institution from a genetic quarantine center to a sort of eugenics factory, where the variously unfit could be committed for a short time, sterilized, and then released, like cats, back into the general population, with the happy assurance that they would never reproduce.
A number of states passed laws permitting eugenic sterilization in the early twentieth century, some of which were subsequently struck down in court. Virginia passed its law in 1924, largely thanks to Priddy’s advocacy, but he was advised not to carry out any sterilizations until the law had been tested in court as far as appeals would take it. For this, he needed a patient to pin his legal case on. Carrie was a desirable candidate for several reasons. She had been declared a middle-grade moron—a technical designation, based on I.Q., that placed her relatively high on the intelligence scale, above the “idiot” and “imbecile” classifications and just below normal. Morons were considered particularly dangerous: they were smart enough to pass undetected and possibly breed with their superiors. Carrie, moreover, had had a child as an unmarried teen-ager, demonstrating the heightened sexuality and fertility—or “differential fecundity”—said to be common among the mentally deficient. Her mother and daughter had been labelled defective as well—the latter, still an infant, without any testing—providing evidence that Carrie’s reported shortcomings were hereditary. All of this added up to a terrifying spectre: Carrie was a walking womb, a pot of genetic poisons that might seep into purer bloodlines. And that is how Carrie Buck came to be at the center of the Supreme Court case Buck v. Bell, which, in an 8–1 decision, made forced sterilization for eugenic purposes legal in the United States.
“Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck,” by the journalist and lawyer Adam Cohen, gives a detailed account of the many forces that converged to bring about the Buck decision, tracing the intersecting paths of the people involved. He begins with Dr. Priddy, who was a true believer in the pure-blooded future. Priddy began pushing for legislation permitting eugenic sterilizations after he was sued by a patient whom he’d sterilized without her consent. He turned to a friend, a lawyer and politician named Aubrey Strode, who emerges as a fascinatingly banal character in Cohen’s account. Strode apparently wasn’t wholeheartedly in favor of the cause, but he did his job, drafting the law, suggesting the test-case approach, and representing the Colony in court. He argued the case before the Supreme Court, won, and then basically never mentioned it again. Carrie’s attorney in the case, selected by her court-appointed guardian, was a man named Irving Whitehead, a childhood friend of Strode’s and a former board member for the Colony. He collaborated with Priddy and Strode on the appeals process and handled Carrie’s case in a thoroughly negligent way.
Strode wrote his legislation based on a model law drafted by the biologist Harry Laughlin, who was the director of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory’s Eugenics Record Office (an epicenter for research in the field) and perhaps the most influential eugenics advocate in the country. If Strode is Eichmann in this story, then Laughlin is Goebbels. (The Nazi comparison feels justified here, if only for its literal relevance: Laughlin corresponded with German eugenicists and was enthusiastic about Hitler’s leadership, praising him for realizing that the “central mission of all politics is race hygiene.” He was also a driving force behind the Immigration Act of 1924, which set strict quotas on various undesirable races, including Jews. He urged maintaining these quotas when, not many years later, large numbers of Jews were trying to flee Europe.) The team in Virginia asked Laughlin to be an expert witness in the Buck case, and he was happy to oblige. Without meeting Carrie, he submitted a notarized statement saying that she had a “record during life of immorality, prostitution, and untruthfulness” and belonged to “the shiftless, ignorant, and worthless class of anti-social whites of the South.” He supported her proposed sterilization as a “potential parent of socially inadequate or defective offspring.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes was on the Court when the case was tried and wrote the majority opinion. Cohen pays particular attention to his role, arguing that Holmes’s reputation as a paragon of democratic wisdom is largely undeserved, and that he was, in reality, a flinty character and an arrogant élitist whose decisions favored the powerful and whose ostensibly progressive opinions were arrived at through illiberal rationale. This reading is certainly borne out by the decision he wrote for Buck v. Bell, which is five paragraphs and contains several coolly vicious flourishes, such as “It is better for the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.” He declared, in reference to Carrie’s family, that “three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
Cohen provides a detailed backstory for each character who appears, wandering sometimes confusingly far afield. But the panoramic view is instructive: one can see these men marching their agendas forward over bridges formed by social connections, whether it’s Priddy asking a friend to write him a law, Holmes being recommended for the Supreme Court by a fellow Boston Brahmin, or Laughlin getting his job at Cold Spring Harbor because he bonded with its founder over their shared love of chicken breeding. Cohen writes that there was widespread skepticism about eugenics among those whom Oliver Wendell Holmes once referred to as “the thick-fingered clowns we call the people,” but the opposition wasn’t large or organized enough to effectively counter the influential network behind the movement.
Carrie herself all but disappears in the book. This isn’t Cohen’s fault: unlike the men in this story, she wasn’t the sort of person to leave behind an archive. Cohen, in fact, does an admirable job collecting scraps of information about her life. She was sterilized soon after the trial, and eventually released from the Colony. She was married in 1932, and again in 1965, after her first husband died. Her daughter, who was raised by the Dobbses, died in 1932; Carrie wasn’t told about her death until months later. Her own mother, Emma, died in 1944, and Carrie found out when she arrived for a visit, two weeks after the funeral. Carrie was evidently a devoted wife who enjoyed reading the newspaper and doing crosswords and never had much money. People who knew her said that they never noticed any signs of mental deficiency. In 1980, some reporters found her and asked what she thought about the Supreme Court case that bore her name. (No one seems to have asked her before.) She said that she would have liked to have a couple of children, and that she hadn’t fully understood the nature of the sterilization procedure until several years afterward. She died in 1983, in a home for the indigent elderly.
Thirty-two states passed eugenic-sterilization laws during the twentieth century, and between sixty and seventy thousand people were sterilized under them. The rhetoric of the movement toned down after the U.S. went to war with Germany; most American eugenicists abandoned their explicit praise of the Nazi project, and the field dwindled as an area of officially sanctioned research. (The disassociation did not go both ways: Buck v. Bell was cited by the defense at Nuremberg.) But the sterilization rate remained high even after the Second World War. So many poor Southerners underwent the procedure that it became known as a “Mississippi appendectomy.” It was only in the nineteen-sixties and seventies, with evolving attitudes toward civil and human rights, that states began repealing their sterilization laws.
The culminating shock of “Imbeciles”—a book full of shocking anecdotes—is the fact that Buck v. Bell is still on the books and was cited as a precedent in court as recently as 2001. Forced or coercive sterilizations never entirely went away either. In 2013, the Center for Investigative Reporting revealed that at least a hundred and forty-eight female prisoners in California were sterilized without proper permission between 2006 and 2010. Last year, a district attorney in Nashville was fired for including sterilization requirements in plea deals.
Despite these contemporary remnants of America’s involvement in eugenics, and despite the fact that the movement shaped national policy and held sway in the upper reaches of society for many years, this chapter of American history is surprisingly absent from the common conception of the country’s past. It’s not that it has been ignored by historians or journalists. The New Yorkerran a lengthy four-part series on eugenics in 1984, and a number of books have been published on the topic. Many of these works approach the story of American eugenics as though it will be a surprise to the reader, which is probably a safe bet. Of the two other books on Buck v. Bell that have appeared in the past ten years, one has the subtitle “The Secret History of Forced Sterilization and America’s Quest for Racial Purity,” while the other ends by noting that the history of eugenics in the U.S. is “often forgotten.” Cohen, too, writes that “Buck v. Bell is little remembered today.” Yet it seems that the collective forgetfulness is not a matter of some well of information remaining untapped but of our inability or unwillingness to soak up what is drawn out of it.
What is hardest to forget about “Imbeciles” is the stream of grandiose invective against the supposedly unfit—the diatribes concerning “germs of dependency and delinquency” and the “world peopled by a race of degenerates and defectives.” It’s a language that combines the detachment of scientific terminology with the heat of bigoted slurs. It’s clearly from another time, but, lacking any lip service to equality and opportunity and the other touchstones of American political rhetoric, it also seems to come from another country. This is not how we talk about ourselves. And yet there are passages that sound startlingly familiar. In the debate over the Immigration Act of 1924, which excluded eugenically undesirable races from the U.S., a senator from Alabama declared, “We are coming to a pitiful pass in this great country when it is unpopular to speak the English language, the American language”—a lament that might have been taken from yesterday’s paper, except that he was bemoaning the proliferation of Yiddish.
It’s impossible, especially, to read “Imbeciles” without thinking of the current election cycle. Although the concerns of the eugenics movement don’t map neatly onto today’s political divides, patterns of thought are repeated: fears of procreation and infiltration still have force, although they’re directed not at “hopelessly vicious protoplasm” but at “anchor babies”; instead of the pure blood of the Nordic races, we hear invocations of that other superior species, the Winners. The 2016 Presidential campaign has reverberated with appeals to strength and victory and virility and contempt for weakness and failure and foreigners, hitting notes of blatant ugliness that we’re not used to hearing in the public sphere. The response in some quarters has been bafflement, as though this way of speaking had materialized out of nowhere. But perhaps it shouldn’t be so surprising. As Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote to a friend, about his pleasure in writing the Buck decision, “Sooner or later one gets a chance to say what one thinks.”
1. Monica Lewinsky: Led to only the second president in American history to be impeached.
2. Benghazi: Four Americans killed, an entire system of weak diplomatic security uncloaked, and the credibility of a president and his secretary of state damaged.
3. Asia fundraising scandal: More than four dozen convicted in a scandal that made the Lincoln bedroom, White House donor coffees and Buddhist monks infamous.
4. Hillary’s private emails: Hundreds of national secrets already leaked through private email and the specter of a criminal probe looming large.
5. Whitewater: A large S&L failed and several people went to prison. [see footnote]
6. Travelgate: The firing of the career travel office was the very first crony capitalism scandal of the Clinton era.
7. Humagate: An aide’s sweetheart job arrangement.
8. Pardongate: The first time donations were ever connected as possible motives for presidential pardons.
9. Foundation favors: Revealing evidence that the Clinton Foundation was a pay-to-play back door to the State Department, and an open checkbook for foreigners to curry favor.
10. Mysterious files: The disappearance and re-discovery of Hillary’s Rose Law Firm records.
11. Filegate: The Clinton use of FBI files to dig for dirt on their enemies.
12. Hubble trouble: The resignation and imprisonment of Hillary law partner Web Hubbell.
13. The Waco tragedy: One of the most lethal exercises of police power in American history.
14. The Clinton’s Swedish slush fund: $26 million collected overseas with little accountability and lots of questions about whether contributors got a pass on Iran sanctions.
15. Troopergate: From the good old days, did Arkansas state troopers facilitate Bill Clinton’s philandering?
16. Gennifer Flowers: The tale that catapulted a supermarket tabloid into the big time.
17. Bill’s Golden Tongue: His and her speech fees shocked the American public.
18. Boeing Bucks: Boeing contributed big-time to Bill; Hillary helped the company obtain a profitable Russian contract.
19. Larry Lawrence: How did a fat cat donor get buried in Arlington National Cemetery without war experience?
20. The cattle futures: Hillary as commodity trader extraordinaire.
21. Chinagate: Nuclear secrets go to China on her husband’s watch.
Footnote:
The Whitewater controversy (also known as the Whitewater scandal, or simply Whitewater) began with investigations into the real estate investments of Bill and Hillary Clinton and their associates, Jim and Susan McDougal, in the Whitewater Development Corporation, a failed business venture in the 1970s and 1980s.
A March 1992 New York Times article published during the U.S. presidential campaign reported that the Clintons—then governor and first lady of Arkansas—had invested and lost money in the Whitewater Development Corporation. The article stimulated the interest of L. Jean Lewis, a Resolution Trust Corporation investigator who was looking into the failure of Madison GuarantySavings and Loan, owned by McDougal. She looked for connections between the savings and loan company and the Clintons, and on September 2, 1992, she submitted a criminal referral to the FBI naming Bill and Hillary Clinton as witnesses in the Madison Guaranty case. Little Rock U.S. Attorney Charles A. Banks and the FBI determined that the referral lacked merit, but she continued to pursue it. From 1992 to 1994, Lewis issued several additional referrals against the Clintons and repeatedly called the U.S. Attorney's Office in Little Rock and the Justice Department regarding the case. Her referrals eventually became public knowledge, and she testified before the Senate Whitewater Committee in 1994.
David Hale, the source of criminal allegations against the Clintons, claimed in November 1993 that as governor of Arkansas, Clinton had pressured him into providing an illegal $300,000 loan to Susan McDougal, the Clintons' partner in the Whitewater land deal. Clinton supporters regarded Hale's allegations as questionable, as Hale had not mentioned Clinton in reference to this loan during the original FBI investigation of Madison Guaranty in 1989; only after coming under indictment in 1993 did Hale make allegations against the Clintons. A U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission investigation did result in convictions against the McDougals for their role in the Whitewater project; and Bill Clinton's successor as governor, Jim Guy Tucker, was convicted of fraud and sentenced to four years of probation for his role in the matter. Susan McDougal later served 18 months in prison for contempt of court for refusing to answer questions relating to Whitewater. The Clintons themselves were never prosecuted, after three separate inquiries found insufficient evidence linking them with the criminal conduct of others related to the land deal, and McDougal was granted a pardon by President Clinton before he left office.
Ultimately the Clintons were never charged, but 15 other persons were convicted of more than 40 crimes, including Bill Clinton's successor as Governor, who was removed from office.
Jim Guy Tucker: Governor of Arkansas at the time, removed from office (fraud, 3 counts)
Is the Clinton Foundation the Dulles Brother’s Sullivan and Cromwell?
by John Stanton / April 14th, 2016
According to Counterpunch editors Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair:
The desire for secrecy is one of Mrs. Clinton’s enduring and damaging traits…Befitting a Midwestern Methodist with a bullying father, repression has always been one of Mrs. Clinton’s most prominent characteristics. Hers has been the instinct to conceal, to deny, to refuse to admit any mistake. Mickey Kantor, the Los Angeles lawyer who worked on the 1992 [presidential] campaign, said that Hillary adamantly refused to admit to any mistakes. Since Vietnam, there’s never been a war that Mrs. Clinton didn’t like. She argued passionately in the White House for the NATO bombing of Belgrade. Five days after September 11, 2001, she was calling for a broad war on terror…“I’ll stand behind [George W.] Bush for a long time to come”, Senator Clinton promised, and she was as good as her word, voting for the Patriot Act and the wide-ranging authorization to use military force against Afghanistan…Of course she supported without reservation the attack on Afghanistan and, as the propaganda buildup toward the onslaught on Iraq got underway, she didn’t even bother to walk down the hall to read the national intelligence estimate on Iraq before the war.
As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton instigated and legitimized the overthrow of the Honduran government in 2009 not all that unlike the 1954 Guatemala Coup engineered primarily by CIA Director Allen Dulles, supported by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, and with the glowing approval of President Dwight Eisenhower.
In a March 2016 interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now, Greg Grandin, a professor of Latin American history at New York University, discussed the fallout from the 2009 Honduran Coup.
I mean, hundreds of peasant activists and indigenous activists have been killed. Scores of gay rights activists have been killed. I mean, it’s just—it’s just a nightmare in Honduras. I mean, there’s ways in which the coup regime basically threw up Honduras to transnational pillage. And Berta Cáceres [a prominent Honduran activist assassinated in 2016], in that interview, says what was installed after the coup was something like a permanent counterinsurgency on behalf of transnational capital. And that was—that wouldn’t have been possible if it were not for Hillary Clinton’s normalization of that election, or legitimacy.
In an April interview with Dana Frank, professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz, on Democracy Now, Frank indicated that President Obama had basically turned over Central and South America to Hillary Clinton. Frank then said this:
I think it’s really about the U.S. pushback against the democratically elected governments of the left and the center-left that came to power in Latin America in the ’90s and in the 2000s—Venezuela, Bolivia, Argentina, Ecuador, Chile, El Salvador, all these countries. And Zelaya was the weakest link in that chain. He, himself, did not come out of a big social movement base at the time of his election, certainly since the coup. And I think they were—the U.S. was looking for a way to push back against that. There’s a very important military base, U.S. military base, Soto Cano Air Force Base, in Honduras. And Honduras has always been the most captive nation of the United States in Latin America. So, I think they were testing what they could get away with. And they got away with it. It was the first domino pushing back against democracy in Latin America and reasserting U.S. power, in service to a transnational corporate agenda.
It’s Not Your Country or Life
The 1954 coup that ousted Guatemalan President Jacob Arbenz from the presidency had the same rationale as Hillary Clinton’s 21st Century Honduran effort. David Talbot, writing in the must-read book The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA and the Rise of America’s Secret Government, noted that Arbenz’s mistake was antagonizing the United Fruit Company by attempting to “expropriate acreage from the United Fruit Company’s large holding that were not under cultivation, and [Arbenz] had offered the multinational corporation fair compensation for the seized land.”
But United Fruit had powerful connections in the Eisenhower Administration. John Foster Dulles had long been a legal advisor to United Fruit for many years. Both brothers held shares of stock in the company. Robert Cutler, head of Eisenhower’s National Security Council, was the former chair of United Fruit. Walter “Beetle” Smith, former CIA director and close friend of Eisenhower, would end up on the United Fruit Board of Directors after the coup. Even Eisenhower’s personal secretary, Ann Whitman, was affiliated with United Fruit: her husband was its publicity director. Other violent overthrows of foreign governments and the destruction of their societies for crass business and career interests would be coated by Allen Dulles in layers of red paint; that is, Communist red paint. Murder, extortion, coups, wars, torture, oppression, censorship, lies, theft, profits, racism, threat exaggeration and evil leadership would be legitimized under the guise of national security during the Cold War. Just so.
According to Talbot, “By the time the bloodletting had run its course [in Guatemala], four decades later, over 250,000 people had been killed in a nation whose total population was less than four million when the reign of terror began.”
For many years, the Dulles brothers were ensured the support of the gatekeepers in banking, finance, media, the military and the US Congress through relationships made and sealed during World War I, the interwar years, and World War II. The Nazis would serve the Dulles brothers well in their private and public roles. Allen would direct the merger of the CIA with some of the worst elements of the defeated Third Reich. John Foster—who while at Sullivan and Cromwell pushed back against closing its satellite office in Nazi Germany– often advocated that nuclear weapons should be viewed as conventional weapons. In some sense, the two brothers seemed to possess the same zealousness and cruelty of the Third Reich.
Near WWII’s end, Allen protected Nazi intelligence chief for the Eastern Front, Major General Reinhard Gehlen, from war crimes trials and would later merge Gehlen’s operatives and network into the CIA’s operation. Gehlen would become the first chief of West German intelligence (BND) and hold the position until 1968. Allen also cut clandestine deals with other Nazis—government officials, bankers, scientists, researchers, et al–through various operations like PAPERCLIP and SUNRISE. Nazi expertise was used in experimental brain/cognitive modification via ARTICHOKE and MKULTRA. Talbot speculates, chillingly, that Allen was connected with the assassination of John F. Kennedy and not only via his critical role on the Warren Commission. Talbot documents the frenetic activity at the ex-CIA director’s residence in Georgetown, Washington, DC, prior to 22 November 1963. He also notes Allen’s encampment at “The Farm”—a clandestine training center on the CIA campus—from 22 to 24 November 1963.
It’s a Good Day for Someone Else to Die Hard
According to Consortium News, when Hillary Clinton was asked about the death of Muammar Qaddafi, Libya’s deposed ruler, at the hands of a mob, she said, “We came, we saw, he died.” That’s a comment Allen Dulles–or a psychopath–might have made. That’s worrisome in a world in which President Hillary Clinton may become a reality. Her penchant for war, secrecy and cover-up, Yale pedigree and alumni network, corporate connections from Wall Street to London, fealty to Israel, shapeshifting Republican/Democrat persona, and the use of the Clinton Foundation as a sort of non-profit, quasi-government, global intelligence/networking agency makes comparing her with the Dulles brothers — and their public/private lives — not as crazy as it first seems. The Clinton Foundation has initiatives in dozens of countries throughout the world. Its connections in international corporate board rooms and the principals of foreign national and local governance give it access to information/intelligence. It is also involved in US domestic political campaigns indirectly through its donors.
For example, one of the Clinton Foundation’s board members is Frank Guistra. According to a 2013 Huffington Post article:
Clinton was borrowing [Giustra’s private jet] to begin a four-day speaking tour of Latin America that would pay him $800,000…Frank Giustra was forming a friendship that would make him part of the former president’s inner circle and gain him introductions to presidents of Kazakhstan and Colombia… Giustra’s self-serving philanthropy also took him and Clinton to Kazakhstan in September 2007, as documented in a January 2008 New York Times investigation… Within two days [of the beginning of the trip], corporate records show that Mr. Giustra also came up a winner when his company [UrAsia Energy Ltd.] signed preliminary agreements giving it the right to buy into three uranium projects controlled by Kazakhstan’s state-owned uranium agency, Kazatomprom,”…The monster deal stunned the mining industry, turning an unknown shell company [UrAsia] into one of the world’s largest uranium producers in a transaction ultimately worth tens of millions of dollars to Mr. Giustra….Just months after the Kazakh pact was finalized, Mr. Clinton’s charitable foundation received its own windfall: a $31.3 million donation from Mr. Giustra… Within a year and a half, Giustra sold off his stake in the Kazatomprom joint venture for $3.1 billion, which he had originally purchased for $450 million.
In a 2015 Washington Post piece by Laura Vozzella on the governor of Virginia, Terry McAuliffe:
More than 175 contributors to the Clinton Foundation and to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s 2016 Democratic presidential campaign have dug deep into their wallets for McAuliffe (Democrat), often giving prolifically despite little or no connection to Virginia…Among them is an Omaha database executive who lavished so much corporate jet travel on himself and the Clinton family that shareholders forced him out. A Hollywood media mogul with a singular interest in Israel. And an Argentine-born energy tycoon who recalled visiting Richmond just once — flying in and out years ago with Bill Clinton, his Georgetown classmate. Of the $60 million McAuliffe has raised for his two gubernatorial bids, inauguration, political action committee and the Democratic Party of Virginia, nearly $18 million has come from contributors to the Clinton Foundation or to Hillary Clinton’s current campaign.
Former President Bill Clinton at a benefit concert for his wife in New York City in March. (Photo: Mike Segar/Reuters)
When Bill Clinton left office in 2001, historians compared him to Teddy Roosevelt. Like the Bull Moose, the Big Dog was unusually young (only 54) and still popular when he finished his presidency. He established his base in New York, about 100 blocks from where Roosevelt was born.
For a while there was even talk of Clinton running for mayor, as Roosevelt once had. What a spectacle that would have been.
Looking back now, though, the comparison seems wildly off. Roosevelt, you may recall, ended up running for president again and then crusading against Woodrow Wilson’s pacifism. To the day he died in 1919, TR jealously protected his twin legacy of reform and internationalism.
Clinton, on the other hand, has run from every big ideological fight like a man on parole. From the moment he stepped out of the White House, the husband of a newly elected senator, his own political interests have been subservient to his wife’s.
Sure, he started a foundation and got crazy rich, but for the last 16 years — a period in which much of what he achieved has been steadily distorted and discredited — Clinton has been chained by the role of dutiful political spouse.
And so this is what it’s come to, as the most talented campaigner of the modern age apologizes for defending his own record and stumps cautiously for Hillary ahead of next week’s New York primary. What was supposed to be the final validation of Bill Clinton’s legacy inside the Democratic Party — the election of his wife as a successor — has now become the only thing left that can save it.
To be clear, Clinton’s governing legacy, unlike Roosevelt’s, featured little by way of transformative legislation. Though he presided over a surging economy, Clinton’s presidency played out mostly like a tragedy in three acts: first the stumble over health care; then the survival of Republican rule through compromise; and finally the sex scandal that crippled his second term.
Whatever lasting achievements Clinton might have claimed as world leader were probably washed away eight months after he left office, when the sudden strike of terrorists exposed a glaring failure of his tenure.
But Clinton’s more lasting political legacy — the thing for which he should have been remembered — was the transformation of the Democratic Party from a tired, marginalized coalition of interest groups to a governing entity that embraced modern realities.
As I was recently reminded watching “Crashing the Party,” an upcoming documentaryabout the founding of the Democratic Leadership Council in the 1980s, Democrats by 1992 had lost five of the previous six presidential elections and were losing ground everywhere else. They were perceived, fairly, as reflexively anti-military and anti-business.
Clinton’s central argument, which it took no small amount of courage to make in those early days, was that in order to both win and govern effectively, Democrats had to stop agitating for an ever more expansive government and start trying to build a better one.
That was the philosophy that underlay Clinton’s string of pragmatic achievements: free trade, a balanced budget, welfare reform, the crime bill. For a while, anyway, it seemed like he had left an indelible stamp on the party, widening its focus from the poor and excluded to encompass the broader middle class.
Except then came the Iraq War and the collapse of Wall Street, a crushing recession followed by an even more crushing recession and soaring inequality. Angry liberal populism reemerged as a powerful force, first in Howard Dean’s insurgency and then through the reborn John Edwards and now Bernie Sanders.
At first, both Clintons tried gamely to defend the underpinnings of what became known as Clintonism. “I think that if ‘progressive’ is defined by results, whether it’s in health care, education, incomes, the environment, or the advancement of peace, then we had a very progressive administration,” Clinton told me during an interview in 2006 for my first book, on Democratic politics.
When I had lunch with him in South Carolina the next year, while working on a cover piece for the New York Times Magazine about his legacy, Clinton readily agreed to talk more about it. By then, though, Hillary Clinton’s aides had decided that the more Bill went on about his own centrist legacy, the less helpful he became. They promptly quashed the interview.
Now, some eight years later, the DLC is long dead (succeeded by a group called Third Way), and Clinton’s legacy inside his own party is savaged as never before. He’s derided on the left as a shill for Wall Street, a racist for supporting mass incarceration, a conservative for overhauling welfare.
Clinton refuses to defend his own record at any length, and when he can’t help himself and plunges in anyway — as he did in rightly defending the crime bill to a couple of activists last week — he almost immediately retreats.
It’s hard now to escape the conclusion that Clinton did not ultimately transform his party, the virus of Clintonism having been expelled from its bloodstream. Ordinary Democrats still love the former president, but the Democratic leaders and activists reject pretty much everything he stood for.
In politics, you see, timing is everything. Bill Clinton arrived on the scene at a time when Democrats were desperate and dispirited, and they were willing to entertain any argument that might reverse their string of losses, even if it clashed with their own dogma.
Hillary never had that luxury. She’s trying to fend off her own Jerry Brown circa 1992 at a time when Democrats have been winning presidential elections, and winning parties tend to care a lot about ideological purity. She can’t have Bill out there excoriating populism and protectionism.
Maybe this is Bill Clinton’s penance — the price he pays for having humiliated his wife so publicly in 1998. Maybe in order to salvage what remained of his presidency and his marriage, he ultimately had to be willing to sacrifice his own case for historical relevance.
Maybe this is why Clinton seems so much older all of a sudden, the white hair more brittle, the eyes more watery, the cranelike movements of the arms slower and more deliberate. You can imagine how all that forced silence takes its toll, how physically ruinous it must be to keep the fury inside, when all you want to do is defend yourself.
What we know is that if Hillary Clinton goes on from New York to win the nomination, it will have more to do with the Obama record than with her husband’s. And if she’s elected in November, it won’t validate Bill’s legacy so much as offer him some path to redemption.
Bill Clinton once argued to me that Teddy Roosevelt didn’t see his own progressive legacy affirmed for 24 years after he left office, when his distant cousin, Franklin, was elected with the same name and a similar platform. That may or may not be a sound interpretation of history.
Football stars, internationally renowned actors and the friends and family of current and former world leaders are among those named in the Panama Papers scandal.
On Sunday, more than 100 news outlets around the world published stories on the Panama Papers, the more than 11 million files that were leaked from Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonesca. The law firm is believed to have helped wealthy individuals set up offshore shell companies that in some cases allegedly helped them to hide assets, carry out drug or arms deals or avoid paying taxes.
The files span 40 years. They were given to the International Consortium of International Journalists (ICIJ) and German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung, which helped dozens of media outlets conduct a year-long investigation into the findings. The source of the leak is not known.
The ICIJ has a detailed list of politicians, public officials and their friends and family members who were named in the documents. They include Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani, the former prime minister of Qatar and Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, former emir of Qatar; Petro Poroshenko, the president of Ukraine; Rami and Hafez Makhlouf, cousins of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad; and Ian Cameron, British Prime Minister David Cameron's father.
Other high-profile figures listed below were also named in the documents, though it does not necessarily mean they were involved in illegal conduct.
Sigmundur Gunnlaugsson
Iceland’s Prime Minister Sigmundur Gunnlaugsson had been accused of hiding millions of dollars in an offshore firm based in the British Virgin Islands. According to documents that are part of the Panama Papers leak, Gunnlaugsson and his wife, Anna Sigurlaug Palsdottir, bought offshore company Wintris in 2007 and used it to hide their investments in three Icelandic banks that collapsed during the 2008 financial crisis.
Gunnlaugsson didn’t declare his interest in Wintris in 2009, when he entered parliament. He maintains that he didn’t break any rules and that he and his wife didn’t benefit financially when he sold the company to her for $1 on December 31, 2009. Gunnlaugsson has so far rejected calls for him to resign from office.
Vladimir Putin
The Panama Papers show a $2 billion trail of hidden assets that leads to Russian President Vladimir Putin. While Putin hasn’t been named in the papers, Sergei Roldugin, a cellist who is Putin's childhood best friend and godfather to the president’s older daughter, has been. According to the documents, Roldugin owns 3.2 percent of Bank Rossiya, a private bank in St. Petersburg, and has a 12.5 percent interest in Video International, Russia’s largest TV advertising agency, which earns more than $1.1 billion a year.
Jackie Chan
The actor was named in the documents leak on Sunday and is believed to have six companies represented by Mossack Fonseca, the AFP reports. Meanwhile, Bollywood film star Amitabh Bachchan was named as the director of four shipping companies established 23 years ago, while his daughter-in-law, actress Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, was named as a former director and shareholder of an offshore company.
Lionel Messi
The world-famous football star was named in the documents along with 20 other high-profile players. In addition to Messi, FIFA officials and the suspended former chief of UEFA, Michel Platini, were also named. Messi and his father, Jorge, have previously been accused of tax fraud after allegedly failing to declare $4.74 million in taxes and are due to stand trial in May.
Mossack Fonseca released a lengthy statement in response to the leak and said it “cannot provide response to questions that pertain to specific matters, as doing so would be a breach of our policies and legal obligation to maintain client confidentiality.”
“However, we can confirm the parties in many of the circumstances you cite are not and have never been clients of Mossack Fonseca,” it said.
“We regret any misuse of companies that we incorporate or the services we provide and take steps wherever possible to uncover and stop such use,” Mossack Fonseca said. “If we detect suspicious activity or misconduct, we are quick to report it to the authorities.”
