Dispatches, by Michael Herr
Patton, George S. III
BOOKS IN REVIEW - "Dispatches, by Michael Herr" of deficits appeared in the city's budget. During the Lindsay administration, deficits grew steadily and were passed from year to year, resulting in an accumulated deficit of $2.3 billion for the...
...What has become of the renowned Woodward and Bernstein...
...Herr speaks of generally complied with the rules and frequently paid the price...
...Yet democratic government depends upon the restraint of its participants and the articulation of a meaningful order of public preferences which reflects the citizenry's desires without distorting them...
...Herr writes of Vietnam, he should remember to research the local rules of engagement...
...chief investigator for the House Judiciary Committee during its impeachment hearings, now wriggles under the eye of a U.S...
...Watergate led to the election of the most ill-prepared president of this century and to the hitherto unimaginable—that is, an actual increase in barbarism in Southeast Asia...
...Joshua Eilberg, who as a member of the House Judiciary Committee observed: `.`Our citizens are afraid that if they take a position on a political issue their telephones will be tapped, their mail opened, and their tax returns audited as a means of punishment...
...Throughout his book, Mr...
...for example, Mr...
...That government withdrew recognition of the needs of the large middle-class and ethnic populations, and failed to make coherent the needs of its remaining constituency...
...Is it possible that the qualities that made him successful abroad made him a disaster at home...
...All we were left were dubious platitudes, and they evanesce further with every inescapable revolution of the planet...
...Except for Michael Herr's personal cynicism, his inaccuracies, and his failure to discuss the American infantry in the favorable light they truly deserve, his story is probably worth reading...
...Neither of them could write...
...And as Nixon leads us through thirty years of prodigious political dramaturgy, the reader becomes steadily more aware of the odd obliviousness about this famous narrator...
...The book itself is the usual bouillabaisse of a presidential memoir, considerably better than LIEU 's but still not up to the readable two volumes written by the irrepressible Harry...
...Those bankers, along with state and federal officials and representatives of the business community, did come to have a lot to say about the institutional arrangements established to oversee retrenchment...
...Beame did indeed attempt to rebuild the Democratic Party organization, but the cost of patronage was relatively low compared to the persistent escalation in substantive budget areas...
...Watergate, of course, is the most catastrophic instance of the Nixon touch...
...Attorney...
...40 The American Spectator June/July 1978...
...Its only benefit is that it brought the retirement of Nixon and with that a quieting of the frantic alarums of the Nixon maniacs...
...The Paris of the East...
...Newfield and DuBrul instead attribute the onset of the crisis to the machinations of a bankers' cabal, thus seeming to relieve New York's upper-middle-class reformers of their responsibility for the city's plight...
...Nor was it a particularly wise investment, since years of exclusion from the center of government had left the party a weakened, inadequate power base...
...They are good reporters—the corruption they document is certainly real—but poor theorists...
...What really brought on Watergate remains a mystery...
...This war affected him profoundly, as it did the entire Army, myself included...
...Today Watergate looks increasingly like a historic black hole in the national chronicle, and if that is all it turns out to have been we shall be fortunate...
...This characterization is entirely mistaken, and I doubt that our infantrymen would accept it...
...Daniel J . Flood, and is there any hope at all for the Rt...
...Indeed, these soldiers were trying to fight a primarily infantry kind of war under some of the Major General George S. Patton III is Commander of the Second Armored Division, United States Army, at Fort Hood, Texas...
...In every scene, grand or minute, Nixon remains always in the dark about the unearthly powers pulling his strings...
...t Viking, $12.95...
...now he stultified and laid low an entire nation...
...What surer flight from Whittier than to expatiate in the language of power and to ponder the use of power on a global stage...
...There was no such weapon used by the conventional units of the United States Army or Marine Corps in the Vietnam war...
...When the crisis finally struck, Beame, though a creature of the party, wasin essentially the same position as his predecessors and therefore without the support to carry out effectively the necessary cutbacks...
...Through the Municipal Assistance Corporation, the Emergency Financial Control Board, and the apparatus of the federal loan program, they intervened to change a variety of the city's policies, from imposing tuition at the City University to raising subway fares...
...I believe that I speak for many commanders in that war, colonel and below, when I say that the fighting soldier was a "winner" in our books and not a "bone dumb grunt...
...Despite all the orotund promises of the episode, it has led to no grand reform...
...Was there something momentous at issue in the Hiss case...
...He slipped so deeply into obscurity so rapidly that the American Express company exploited his instant anonymity in a television ad featuring him and Barry Goldwater's running-mate as two typical nonentities urgently in need of American Express cards—a fitting testimonial to the lasting achievements of Watergate...
...Nixon, contrary to the fears of his more obsessive opponents, was a rather ordinary man, distinguished only by his gigantic will to escape ordinariness...
...Or was he ever a success anywhere...
...Nixon dreamed immense dreams, and the setting was usually the whole wide world...
...Nixon was indeed the most reviled man ever to sit in the White House...
...hate him...
...There was plenty of dedication at all levels within the uniformed services throughout the Vietnam war...
...most difficult battlefield and political conditions ever faced by American fighting men...
...Herr speaks frequently of the "bone dumb grunts," and by this "handle" we must assume he is talking about the infantry...
...If my work would put the book on the best-seller list, so much the better...
...But, for the record, he gives little credit to any of the magnificent personalities I served over, with, and under during that period...
...Meditate on the chances of the Rt...
...And forget not that ancient gasbag, Sam Ervin, illustrious constitutional expert...
...It is hardly instructive to label the present arrangement undemocratic, much more useful to recognize that for more than a decade the city's government had already been less than democratic...
...other passages are agony...
...An astonishing number of the leading celebs of the Watergate Spectacular have seen their careers evaporate...
...Heretofore Nixon had dizzied only individuals...
...Some of the writing is surprisingly crisp and insightful...
...Pearl of the Orient, long open avenues lined and bowered over by trees running into spacious parks precisioned scale, all under the , soft shell from a million breakfast fires, camphor smoke rising and diffusing, covering Saigon and the shining veins of the river with a warmth like the return of better times...
...This is a cynical, shallow report replete with most of the well-known four-letter words used in armies worldwide...
...His references to ".30 caliber automatic fire" are simply incorrect unless he is alluding to ARVN or Special Forces units...
...What became of John Dean or Senator Daniel K. Inouye...
...No one had much dedication, according to Mr...
...He is elliptical...
...What was the reason for the Cold War...
...The government in New York City that fostered the destruction of democratic practices was hardly a permanent one, it was simply unworkable...
...Who were his enemies and why did they * Grosset & Dunlap, $19.95...
...Even John Doar, Esq...
...Many of the changes made under the aegis of these institutions have been unfortunate, but more importantly, many would have been unnecessary had the city's government been able to control the growth of its budget to begin with...
...I, of course, purchased a copy immediately, and if I had the funds I would purchase thousands more, gladly sending them to high elected Nixon maniacs with ..he forged inscription, "Compliments of Stansfield Turner...
...They were confronted with a terribly difficult job: fighting for a confused and frustrated America in a war they were not permitted to win...
...The final irony of Nixon is that the very qualities that earned him the wary respect of tyrants drove many American liberals right out of their minds...
...Yet he blew up, and with his passing, millions of citizens in foreign lands slipped into the claws of Communism and barbarity...
...I would guess that his various "trips" may in some ways have affected his journalistic credibility...
...Herein lies the saddest part of the Nixon legend...
...These rules, peculiar to the Vietnam war, restricted the ground combat soldier and, in several instances personally observed by this reviewer, cost him life and limb...
...His certitudes only go so far...
...But it is unlikely that Papa Brezhnev ever laughed at him...
...The next time Mr...
...There have been no chastening lessons, no lasting heroes, and no useful myths...
...Herr writes, "I went to cover the war, and the war covered me...
...The American Spectator June/ July 1978 39 In that space, at that hour, you could see what people had seen forty years liefore...
...Despite the author's cynicism, there are parts of Dispatches which are quite well done...
...But a city cannot long continue to practice deficit finance, the equivalent of inflation, without printing its own money—a measure which even the boldest New Yorkers failed to consider...
...The inevitability of the crisis is something the authors prefer not to address...
...Newfield and DuBrul focus their criticism on the activities of the "permanent government" during the Beame years, ignoring the fact that most of the deficit was amassed prior to his administration...
...the bedwetters fear a political comeback...
...As one who spent nearly three years of his life in Vietnam, in various capacities, I must say that I found Mr...
...Herr's book interesting...
...In Dispatches, those who were against the war will find more grist for their mill...
...Its fundamental issues grow increasingly hazy with the passage of time...
...Their only talent as journalists was their ability to answer crank calls in the night, from whom no one knows, and the boys are not telling, at least not until the price is right...
...By and large they performed well...
...With Nixon is the best discussion of Nixon's character, of the odd standards by which others weighed him, and of the even odder predicaments into which he so often fell...
...This picture of Saigon by day and night is fine and, by my memory, very accurate...
...Ho Chi Minh and General Giap had very little fun at his expense...
...According to Herr, very few of us there had much of a sense of pride, patriotism, or duty, virtues once considered the foundation of our country...
...My guess is that they are both afflicted with obscure and horrible diseases, never to be heard from again...
...In desperation a boycott has been slapped on the book, and in the book trade many a staunch defender of the First Amendment is promising not to stock it...
...It is an odd twist—and a mark of the inferior men we have elected to the White House—that Nixon was one of our best-equipped presidents for international diplomacy...
...Charles C. Diggs...
...In my opinion, this is blatantly untrue...
...Even during the grimmest moments of Watergate, times when I had been lead to believe he was plotting the overthrow of the Constitution, the poor fish was grandly discoursing to his aides on the Middle East, China's geopolitical interests, Brezhnev's yearnings for a fat and shiny Lincoln...
...He was also the easiest laugh in our history...
...Now the publication of RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon* threatens to undo even that emaciated benefit...
...The "bone dumb grunts" Mr...
...After 1968 he seems to have forgotten...
...Neither of these hinds has done anything remarkable since Nixon's last helicopter flight, and I contest the notion that they ever did do anything remarkable except hog the show right up to the last limits of the plausible...
...Herr writes of his personal use of drugs and about"getting stoned" while in the field...
...Each of us played a part in that defeat and holds a portion of the responsibility for it in his own hands...
...As I recall, these included such constraints as "don't fire until fired upon," as well as free-fire zones...
...Nowhere is Nixon's fascination with international relations discussed more vividly than in With Nixon, t the product of Raymond Price, a gifted Nixon aide who seems to have escaped the Commoner from Whittier unscathed...
...It was my lasting impression that their sense of duty confirmed General Douglas Mac-Arthur's description of the American soldier as one of the world's noblest figures...
...Herr's description of Saigon: Beautiful for once and only once, just past dawn flying toward the center of the city—at 800 feet...
...I think it is particularly tragic when one who has been called "the Stephen Crane of this century'' describes infantry—especially Vietnam war infantry—in such a manner...
...By 7:30 AM it was beyond berserk with bikes, the air was like LA on shortplumbing, the subtle city was inside the war, had renewed itself for another day, relatively light on actualviolence, but intense with bad feeling: despair, impacted rage, impotent gnawing resentment, thousands of Vietnamese in the service of a pyramid that wouldn't stand for five years, Plugging the feed tube into their own hearts , grasping and gorging...
...Nixon is gone—hurrah!--but so is any semblance of a serviceable foreign policy...
...BOOK REVIEW Dispatches Michael Herr / Knopf / $8.95 George S. Patton III Dispatches by Michael Herr is an account of his experiences in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam war...
...EDITORIAL (continued from page 4) Howe, and the Rt...
...No sooner had it appeared in serial form than the maniacs were howling about the enormous profits and moaning that RN contained no lascivious revelations...
...During the Lindsay administration, deficits grew steadily and were passed from year to year, resulting in an accumulated deficit of $2.3 billion for the final Lindsay budget...
...An indication of the preternatural circumstances surrounding the man is that merely by asking the question one sets off sirens and shouting matches...
...Their facts do not add up...
...It must be remembered that we all witnessed our nation suffer the first strategic defeat in its history...
...When it was over, our allies and our enemies were left rubbing their eyes in amazement...
...Herr's statistics on losses (both the enemy's and ours) are his and his alone (at least he identifies no source for them) and are of doubtful accuracy...
...When the crisis came in 1975 during the Beame administration, the accumulated deficit had reached $3.3 billion, which had to be financed in a national short-term municipal securities market of only $11 billion...
...And as westerners go, Nixon was probably Chou and Mao's only drinking buddy...
...In an attempt artificially to impose restraint upon the municipal labor unions, they demanded and won extensive union pension-fund investments in city securities, thus linking more closely the fate of the unions with that of the city...
...This result makes it imperative that Richard Nixon be impeached" ? Nearly fifty congressmen from the Watergate era have been indicted or are lying low...
...Hence he devoted himself to foreign policy...
Vol. 11 • June 1978 • No. 8
