LETTERS
LETTER Gray area Peter Gray is correct that the end of the Cold War offers us a chance to reexamine our tolerance for lying [“Lie Society,” May]. He does violence to history, however,...
...To take only one example, Victor Kravchenko, the first to successfully report Stalinist atrocities to a mass Western audience, narrowly escaped deportation to KGB vengeance...
...So when a National Center for Nonprofit Boards spokeswoman tells Shenk, “There’s nothing wrong with the system” as it is, she sums up the sad state of affairs in one sentence...
...Clearly, a single board asleep at the switch is not the problem...
...Like bloodhounds following the purse snatcher and missing the bank robber, they’ve been duped by the same misunderstanding, sniffing out comparably minor tidbits of waste and conflict while completely missing the massive losses wrought by misdirection and boards’ failure to force systems to produce results...
...JOHN CARVER Camel, Indiana Subversive Art Regarding Art Levine’s April annotations [“The PR Papers”]: Does The Washington Monthly wish to encourage journalists to all but steal private business correspondence...
...rather, the wide acceptance of mediocre, sleepwalking governance is...
...Most of the book’s array of proposed improvements can be implemented within the ambit of the current laws...
...Nixon nixed it Charles Peters claims that the Peace Corps shrank to 4,000 or 5,000 members during the seventies and eighties because Americans no longer felt the need to serve their country [Tilting at Windmills, April...
...I am under no illusion that such a plan would be easy to implement or perfectly effectivl:, but the havoc wrought by a relatively small number of problem drinkers (repeat drunken drivers and drunken assailants) is so great that even a modest degree of success could save many lives...
...Go back and check the budget or ask anyone who was there, like I was...
...And where have your colleagues in the press been...
...The real liar about Agent Orange and PCBs has not been the U.S...
...Nonprofits and public organizations, in the absence of proper governance, are allowed to exist on the influence of the righteous busybodies on their boards, not the results the institutions themselves obtain...
...I merely wanted to raise the question of whether any drug made legally available to some adults should automatically be made available to all, even those who behave recklessly or criminally under its influence...
...If a store clerk accidentally hands Levine too much change, does he keep it, or correct the error...
...Notwithstanding the dubious value of Joe Blatchford’s two-year-old memo as a target for ridicule, Levine’s dirty trick seems less worthy than the memo he attacks...
...To set the record straight: The Peace Corps shrank because the Nixon administration appointed Joe Blatchford to reduce it to that size...
...Even later, when Stalin was fully discredited, the Left quietly defamed Kravchenko as a self-dramatizing CIA mouthpiece...
...But the number of volunteers had already begun to shrink in 1967 and in the seventies and eighties there were many fewer applicants than in the sixties...
...The concept of grudging toleration is largely a device to point out the discontinuity between current policies toward even the most tightly restricted licit drugs and those that apply to “controlled substances...
...Illnesses among Vietnam soldiers reportedly caused by Agent Orange-apart from chloracne and, possibly, nonHodgkins lymphoma-invariably turn out to be either within normal probabilities or traceable to other causes...
...Second, the idea of a personal drug use license is not intended as a panacea...
...And the nonprofits alone spend over $1 billion per day under this system of non-leadership...
...government, but rather left-wing panicmongers...
...If the voters loved Ronald Reagan because he kept things simple when he told them he wanted to cut taxes, reduce government, and rebuild the military, why should Clinton have to confuse the press and simple-minded voters and in the process commit political suicide by dealing with the major issues...
...The American Left savagely attacked anyone who challenged their Stalinist illusions...
...As much as folks parrot the old line about boards having “ultimate accountability,” it is often forgotten whenever there are other scapegoats...
...DAVID H. ELLIOTT Bialystok, Poland The author replies: Blatchford gave me the memo...
...But the cure for board somnambulism is not more conscientious engagement in a failed process (more committees meddling into administration, more of the board “approval” ritual), but going back to the drawing board with what governing boards should be all about...
...Her organization, along with United Way, Independent Sector, and just about every other reputable authority, seems oblivious to the fact that the governance process so unquestioningly accepted in conventional wisdom is a joke...
...HUGO S. CUNNINGHAM Somerville, Massachusetts What makes Billy pander...
...Us worry about ihe bank going down the tubes...
...And the latter is the greater travesty, for systems that have no pressure to produce results get sloppy and turn inward...
...In reference to “Substance Abuse” [Christopher Georges, May], the real issue is that even though Bill Clinton may occasionally tell voters what they want to hear to boost his popularity, his record indicates that he will do whatever it takes to do the right thing for all Americans once in office...
...And that will take a radical overhaul of nonprofit, public, and business boards alike...
...PCBs are highly toxic to certain rodents but not, reportedly, to human beings...
...The biggest lie of the 20th century was that Stalin, the murderer of 20 million, was in fact a humanitarian social reformer...
...What about Charlie Peters...
...It is disappointing that a magazine that should be justifiably proud of its high journalistic standards would publish an article born of what appears to be a blatantly unethical act...
...It is clear from Clinton’s record and proposals that he has a New Deal-type of plan for our inner cities, a welfare reform agenda, and an economic strategy to revitalize our economy...
...LETTER Gray area Peter Gray is correct that the end of the Cold War offers us a chance to reexamine our tolerance for lying [“Lie Society,” May...
...ROBERT JASTREBSKI Prospect, Illinois Drug addition Allow me to offer two small clarifications to Nathaniel Wice’s thoughtful review of my book Against Excess: Drug Policy for Results [Booknottis, May...
...A spectacular chemical fire at Seveso, Italy, exposed thousands to doses of PCB much higher than those in Vietnam, but apart from chloracne rash, expected medical horrors did not appear...
...You may have noticed that during the recent years of railing against the: sad state of American education, there has been plenty of bashing of teachers, administrators, teachers’ unions, and teachers’ colleges, but little ire directed at school boards...
...He does violence to history, however, by implying that those on the Left are always the innocent victims of lies...
...Why should he self-destruct by bringing up these issues when the president hasn’t done anything about them in four years and only pays lip service to the fact that we are facing great problems...
...The slate can only be wiped clean if all liars are called to account...
...The story here should be that George Bush will tell Americans what they want to hear and proceed to do only that which benefits the special interests he favors...
...It doesn’t mean Bill Clinton couldn’t have qualified through the squeeze, but it wasn’t a lack of volunteers in the country that shrank the ranks of the Peace JULIA LACEY Washington, D.C The author replies: It is true that Nixon’s and subsequent administrations, by their hostility and indifference, accelerated the decline of the Peace Corps...
...MARK KLEIMAN Cambridge, Massachusetts Aramonium I was wondering when someone would notice that the United Way board bore some responsibility for the Aramony fiasco [“Board Stiffs,” David Shenk, May...
...They carried on their fundamentally ill-designed task like the board of Continental Illinois (What...
...Watch any school board, city council, or social service agency board for 30 minutes-if you can stand the boredom-and you can’t miss my point...
...First, changing the drug laws in the direction of “grudging toleration” is not central to the book’s argument, which is more analytic than prescriptive...
...or the board of the University of Minnesota (We weren’t the ones who spent all that money on the president’s home...
Vol. 24 • July 1992 • No. 7
