Loose Change, by Sara Davidson

...Some of the people she covered for the Boston Globe, for example, were chagrined by their portraits, when all she'd done was to tell the honest truth about them as human beings...

...Louis Nizer's My Life in Court is probably the best-selling example of the genre...

...And if, in fact, his commanders and their staff judge advocates were not favorably impressed by some of the artful dodges which he gleefully recounts, their reaction was human, if not legal...

...Through the years of student unrest—and graduate and post-graduate student unrest—Jeff taught her right thinking about who should own what, who should kill whom, whether the revolution should come now or later, and who should carry it out...

...After years of searching—at Berkeley, in communes in the west, in an adobe hut in New Mexico, and even in Vietnam—she finally found her identity...

...Susie's is explicitly obscene...

...For herself, she worried about her body odor—and Jef sand whether to tell Jeff she'd never had, couldn't have, couldn't even imagine an orgasm...

...And, more importantly, they are, by their own account, describing a historic period in human and social development...

...the Articles of War were perceived as essentially a method by which military 34 The American Spectator January 1978...

...About half the book is in fact a polemic against command influence, military justice, and the military in general, including an entire chapter on that monumentally trivial species of oppression, the Army's haircut regulations...

...They claimed to be idealistic, but their idealism—devoid of both ideals and ideas—was merely the automatic and contemptuous rejection of their parents' ideas and ideals...

...gential: They suggest, in fact, that military defense counsel has about as good a chance as a civilian lawyer of obtaining an acquittal (just or unjust) in a criminal trial...

...She was a doctor at heart, one whose mission was to make sure women would be on intimate terms with their bodies...

...BOOK REVIEW They Call It Justice: Command Influence and the Court-Martial System Luther C. West / Viking Press / $12.95 Joseph W. Bishop, Jr...

...If he is right, those superiors were guilty of violating Article 37 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice which, inter alia, forbids commanders to "give a less favorable rating or evaluation...because of the zeal with which [the person being rated] represented any accused before a court-martial...

...They considered themselves to be deeply devoted to this great upheaval going on around them...

...In military practice, as in civilian, most cases are settled by plea-bargaining...

...The military may press doubtful charges when the case involves a variety of malefaction (e.g., black marketing or racial brawling) on which the commander wants to crack down...

...Nor am I much edified by his policy, when he became a staff judge advocate himself, of recommending to the convening authority that every sentence be reduced or suspended, without regard to the merits of the particular case...

...Colonel West repeatedly complains that his career as a regular army judge advocate was ruined by his superiors' resentment of his success as defense counsel...

...that magic formula sets them free: They behave in the most despicable way and expect praise for it —because they have the right credentials...

...One would be hard put to find more self-involved, mindless, and grasping people than Sara and her gang...

...Pride of place goes, in art as in life, to Natasha, whose fey beauty and spirituality won for her a special place in the hearts of all who knew her...

...The result is a not-too-subtle blend of high-school yearbookese and the latest in ladies' clinical, unerotic pornography...

...Well, at least Jeff Berman, her "co-hab" and later husband, told her she was...

...Nevertheless, command influence in military justice is a serious problem...

...Those who meet Freud on their territory—the arts, anthropology, religion, history—and venture no deeper into his thought, are liable to see him as Nabokov did, as a bit of a charlatan...

...this, of course, is a form of command influence...

...The greatest honesty problem, however, was professional: When she finally decided to abandon the slick and clever tone that had earned her such a reputation as a journalist and to do an honest piece about something she cared passionately about, Esquire, the Atlantic, and Harper's were not impressed...

...Yet it was an amateur's brilliance, and he was dead wrong much of the time—wrong about Dostoevsky, about Leonardo, about Ur-history, embarrassingly wrong about such matters as the authorship of Shakespeare's plays...

...They devoted their lives to making sure that they had what they wanted...

...It seems to have had the desired effect...

...and of course he was much of the time breathtakingly correct...

...Nizer, but some of his tales of his forensic triumphs, and some of his military gossip (of a kind common to armies the world over) about the General's mistress and so forth, are moderately good reading...

...Sara never had a real orgasm problem Of course, she didn't always have them, but often enough that she could say with a fair amount of certainty that she'd overcome the guilt instilled in her by her mother...

...The publisher's blurb de- scribes They Call It Justice: Command Influence and the Court-Martial System as a discussion of "command approved fraud and command rigging of courts-martial" and the "cruelties of the American judicial system," and adds that the author "exposes high-ranking military officers as jury-fixers and conspirators...

...Most cases that go to trial in either system result in guilty verdicts, not because the proceedings are rigged against the accused, but because both district attorneys and military prosecutors are ordinarily reluctant to go to court unless they think the evidence is fairly solid...

...Long before Freud became—in Auden's words —a climate of opinion, he was an extraordinary clinical observer, and this book takes us, calmly and patiently, into that astonishing mind...

...he retired in 1968 with a substantial pension...

...their morality clearly placed no taboo on the public discussion of lovers' weaknesses...

...The writing of this book was undertaken as a cathartic measure...

...She asks us to believe that what she had on her mind was really so much more admirable...

...Once she left college and started making it in the world of journalism, however, she began to encounter them...

...Sara's main problem, as she discovered in college, was that she had no problems...

...His books include Justice Under Fire: A Study of Military Law...

...After she divorced Jeff and got liberated, though, when she was finally allowed to have her own ideas, she found that he had been right all along...

...Each in her own way helped to form and was formed by the social "revolution" of the 1960s...

...Colonel West, who has an unfortunate tendency to lapse into the jargon of the military bureaucracy (e.g., he confuses "advise" and "inform" in a way that sometimes makes his meaning obscure), does not write as well as Mr...

...In 17 years of service he was promoted from First Lieutenant to Captain to Major to Lieutenant Colonel...

...For anyone susceptible to vicarious nostalgia, Loose Change might be mild fun: There's nothing like reading about someone else's adolescent trauma...

...When, a decade or so later, Davidson felt the need to create a history of the generation that discovered sexual liberation, political morality, and idealistic zeal, she decided to do it in the form of a personal memoir of the three charter members she knew best...

...Only by getting it out in the open—by exploring the reason for this unflinching honesty—could she really deal with her past and get on with the future...

...And yet, having demonstrated their clear inferiority as human beings, they demand recognition of their clear superiority to the rest of us money-grubbers...

...by the time the book was finished, Sara was feeling better about the world and looking ahead with a more hopeful eye...

...And what they wanted was to look pretty, to have nice clothes, to own nice furniture, and to be accorded therespect due them as members of the most wonderful group of kids ever produced...

...ideas, she took his word for it...

...But district attorneys, who are usually running for higher office, have been known to do the same when the case is sensational and likely to generate headlines...

...But the facts of his careerdo not seem to support his lament...

...The quality of Colonel West's argument is variable...

...She was a revolutionary, only the oppressed class here wasn't the working class or students or even blacks...

...Hours of rap sessions and self-examination later, Loose Change was born...

...Like any good child of the sixties, Davidson is full of contempt for the children of the seventies, who have nothing "on their minds other than money and security...

...The other half is a collection' of anecdotal reminiscences of the sort that most trial lawyers could write and a great many have written...

...Natasha's style is pretentious, laden with clumsy imagery...

...This idyll came, sadly but inevitably, to an end after several years, and Natasha when last seen had found bliss in the arms of Mr...

...And her husband was deeply disturbed because she was toohonest to be able to give him the kind of devoted, unswerving moral support he gave her...

...This memoir is a fascinating—though hardly surprising—revelation of the generation that touted itself as the most idealistic, the most honest, and the most moral ever...

...It was hardly a problem at all until after World War II, for none of the three branches of government saw anything wrong with it...

...Such tactics as securing the dismissal of a charge by spotting a careless typist's omission of a key word (although both he and his client were perfectly aware of the nature of the offense charged), or pressuring a court-martial to acquit (which is a speedier process than conviction and sentencing) by springing on the members at the last moment the news that the helicopter which represented their only chance to avoid spending the night at an exceptionally uncomfortable post in Korea would leave in thirty minutes, are legitimate, and even more or less ethical, but they do not improve the image of the legal profession in the eyes of ordinary citizens...

...the fact is, however, that what she and her friends had on their minds was themselves...

...Sara's is smooth, confident, allusive...

...She probably even felt pretty and had stopped fretting about her too-long legs...

...0 BOOK REVIEW Loose Change: Three Women of the Sixties Sara Davidson / Doubleday / $9.50 Naomi Decter Sara Davidson, Susie Hersh Berman, and Natasha Taylor were sorority sisters at Berkeley in the early sixties...

...Since Susie was not inclined to bother her pretty little head about things like Naomi Decter is a researcher at Newsweek magazine...

...The substance of the book fits its style perfectly: It is a chronicle of ten years of fashions, passing popular fads, and dull, unsatisfying sexual encounters...

...Her honesty, thus, made enemies, broke up her marriage, and caused a decline in her career...

...In fact, as Colonel West does not point out, the conviction rate in courts-martial is not significantly higher than in civilian trials...

...The Army has the additional advantage that the commonest military offense, absence without leave, rarely presents any difficulty of proof...

...His chief attractions seem to have been a taste for the best foods and wines, the money to buy them, and a saintly patience in the matter of listening to and analyzing Natasha's premonitory dreams...

...sometimes it is reasoned and even fairly objective, sometimes hardly above the rant suggested by the blurb...

...it was—her...

...You could say that her greatest problem in that period of her life was her honesty...

...Davidson allows the girls' own voices to color the sections devoted to each of them...

...The book provides, if nothing else, three striking portraits of the flower of our youth...

...But the fun wears thin with the realization that these girls were at the end of their adolescence when their tales began...

...They, after all, are children of the sixties...

...They claimed to be moral, but for them moralitymeant how the world treated them, not how they behaved in it...

...In the clinical realm he was sometimes off the mark, but he seems never to have been entirely wrong...

...Like Natasha, Susie disdained conventionality: She was a revolutionary at Berkeley...

...They claimed to be more honest than preceding generations, but their honesty was nothing more than insensitivity and callousness towards the frailties of others...

...Right—an All-American art dealer with a fourteen-year-old son and a well-stocked kitchen...

...To be sure he functioned brilliantly in these roles, inventing inter aka psychohistory, psychobiography, psychological anthropology, and new modes of literary analysis...

...Their relation to his main theme, however, is at best tanJoseph WI Bishop, Jr., is Richard Ely Professor of Law at Yale University...

...This is almost precisely par for the course, an average career in the regular army...

...It is this demand for automatic and unthinking admiration that makes Loose Change a shameful and disgusting book...

...In New York after college, she landed a job at a suitably fashionable art gallery, lived in a suitably dingy railroad flat, and drifted into a suitably neurotic "relationship" with a famous sculptor, married and twenty years her senior...

...Hadn't she been denied an understanding of the physical functioning of her very own body —and thus denied orgasm—to say nothing of the freedom to think...

...How telling it is that in the midst of the exciting turmoil they worried only about The American Spectator January 1978 33 the size of their breasts, the color of their hair, and, of course, the number of their orgasms...

...Natasha, haunted by the sad end of her father—he gave up his ideals to keep her in Jaguars and birth-control pills—eschewed the conventional life and opted for the deeper life of the New York art world...

...At book's end, she was happily enrolled in medical school, gloating at her triumph over a system that had tried to deprive her, and all women, of their basic human right to orgasm...