Many of the Scrapbook’s readers have expressed sadness that our long- running chronicle of the codependent relationship between sometime supply- side publicist Jude Wanniski and onetime vice-presidential candidate Jack Kemp seemed to reach its end last week. It’s true: We had thought to ring down the curtain on the self-described “puppeteer,” the Geppetto to Kemp’s Pinocchio, who provided the most diverting subplot in the campaign. But even a marionette show deserves a curtain call. And Wanniski has provided one.
Once a noted author and journalist, Wanniski is pioneering a new literary genre these days — the self-published (on his World Wide Web home page) letter-to-the-editor. His Nov. 5 letter to the Washington Post (so far unpublished by the paper) is titled “I Ain’t No Crackpot.” The letter responds to the syndicated column of George Will, who had called Wanniski ” Kemp’s crackpot adviser.”
Wanniski is intent on ridiculing Will’s assessment that the Wanniski Weltanschauung boils down to this proposition: He “thinks World War II was caused by Germany’s tax and monetary policies.”
Now it’s certainly true, as Will suggested, that Wanniski monomaniacally believes tax policy is the engine driving world history. But it turns out, in Wanniski’s words, that he has “never come close to making that crackpot assertion” about Germany’s tax policy. No, the Man Who Would Have Been Counselor to the Vice President insists, it was America’s economic policies that caused World War II, specifically the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, ” a hypothesis that I originated,” he proudly notes.
And with this our chronicle of Wanniski ends . . . we think.
