SOME BOOKS should be read in tandem. One pair for parallel reading: William Manchester’s second volume in his life of Churchill, “Alone,” and Rich Lowry’s fine new effort: “Legacy: Paying the Price for the Clinton Years.” Manchester’s book chronicles the wilderness years of the greatest man of the 20th century, and it is thus obliged to follow the doings of the not-so-great men who held power in Britain through most of the ’30s, including Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain. Here is one small episode from those dreary years:
Compare that passage with Lowry’s account of Clinton-era export of defense technology:
Business considerations also drove the administration’s decontrols on the export of supercomputers which are extremely important in producing ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction. In 1996, the administration began drastically increasing the power of computers that could be exported to China and Russia without a government-approved license, and Chinese and Russian military entities reaped a computing windfall.
Silicon Valley loved it. In the run-up to the 2000 election cycle, it favored the Democrats over the Republicans and was the fourth largest industry contributor to the Democratic National Committee.
The blindness to the mortal threats to England displayed by the Baldwin-Chamberlain administrations is unbelievable at this distance. How could they have not seen trouble coming?
The very same question will dog Clinton and his advisers in the coming years. Lowry’s book gives a start to the necessary but unpleasant task of asking what was Clinton thinking? Manchester gives the answer to that question in regard to Baldwin and Chamberlain: Always and everywhere–themselves.
Hugh Hewitt is the host of The Hugh Hewitt Show, a nationally syndicated radio talkshow, and a contributing writer to The Daily Standard. His new book, In, But Not Of, has just been published by Thomas Nelson.
