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No Gun Ri: What they're saying
Experts grapple with reports that the U.S. committed war crimes during the Korean War.
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[09/30/99]

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Warren Beatty delivers a coquettish speech in Beverly Hills.
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[09/30/99]

Who said "Yes"?
Local reporters have known for months that eyewitnesses disputed the account of Cassie Bernall's "martyrdom." So why did the truth take so long to see print?
By Dave Cullen
[09/30/99]

The flood next time
Hurricanes may be the hand of God, but the disaster in North Carolina is entirely man-made
By Fetzer Mills Jr.
[09/29/99]

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Now, in an even weirder twist, Bauer is emerging from the controversy as an out-and-out women's libber.

Gary Bauer, über-feminist? Until Wednesday, that would have seemed an oxymoron, but the worldview the deeply conservative Christian activist articulated when he appeared at his press conference was straight out of the Mia Hammish millennial zeitgeist:

Women can be anything they want to be.

When Bauer said that he couldn't "imagine that anybody on the campaign would object to me having meetings behind closed doors with professional women," he emerged as nothing less than a sensitive New Age man.

Despite the fact that his homemaker wife of 27 years was by his side, standing by her man, Bauer came off as every bit the modern male, indignantly insisting that he is completely at ease with women in the workforce, where they have every right to be.

"Such meetings take place all over Washington, D.C., every day with congressmen, senators, other presidential candidates," Bauer said. "Both of my daughters intend to be professional women" -- perhaps not unlike the attractive female 26-year-old aide whose company he has been keeping.

After all, as Bauer pointed out, "this isn't 1899."

In response to a question about whether aides told him that the fact that he was seen too often with the aide was causing an "appearance" problem, Bauer made like Alan Alda.

"How are you 'seen' with somebody on your campaign 'too frequently'?!" he sneered. "I am seen with 25 people on my campaign every day. It's a relatively small campaign headquarters. My daughter sits a couple doors down from me. Every day I'm with all the people on that campaign. We're walking through the halls, we have meetings."

There were several questions about the nature of these meetings. Were they closed-door sessions? Bauer's response: "I think that there are standards in American politics that I have followed in 25 years in Washington, D.C. ... At the previous organization I worked at, there were professional women that I met with, that I asked for advice, that were part of my senior staff. I have done nothing different than I've done in 25 years ..."

Sounds awfully progressive for a man who has spent his public life trying to overturn Roe vs. Wade -- especially when you consider the views of his one-time colleagues.

Charles Jarvis, Bauer's former national campaign chairman, and Tim McDonald, his former chief of advance operations -- both of whom jumped ship recently and joined Steve Forbes' campaign -- went public after Bauer's press conference with the real reasons behind their recent exodus.

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