Taking Care of the Law
Methvin, Eugene H.
has been a notable champion of freedom in an age when it has been fearfully assaulted by the forces of mass culture. With such works as The Informed Heart, The Uses of Enchantment, and...
...Nonetheless, Bell's ultimate judgment must be regarded as harsh: Carter failed at governing because the very character of exquisitely sensitive political pragmatist and symbolist that carried him to campaign victory rendered him incapable of steadfast and inspiring leadership as chief executive...
...Special interest groups will stoutly resist, he predicts, "because a single-term President would be less vulnerable to the pressure these groups exert than is a President concerned about winning reelection...
...Whatever other verdict history delivers upon Carter, nothing can detract from that glittering achievement as the epic "long march" of American political history...
...We are not told why...
...It is prescription for societal suicide...
...Sounding loud anti-Washington themes, Jimmy Carter annihilated every rival from his party's congressional ranks and promised a revolution among the power pyramids along the Potomac...
...A Georgia Cracker hath no greater scorn...
...I remember how dumbfounded I was at the Democratic National Convention in July 1976 in New York when Carter announced his choice of Mondale as veep...
...The state legislatures, with the approval of the people, can bring the central governmentunder control...
...This is whut we're talking about, this li'l fish h e a h . " Thus he succeeded in smuggling humor into an administration that, on the whole, proved intensely humorless and stuffy...
...his poll lead of 14 points on Labor Day s h r a n k to less than one percent on election day...
...In the end, it was kowtowing to single interest groups to hold their loyalty for the next election that prevented him from appearing to have a coherent Presidency," Bell concludes...
...He lost cootrol of the judicial nominating process to the White House staffpolitical strategists, as he realized when Carter returned a list of prospects with a longhand instruction to Bell to submit someone other than the nominee he had recommended...
...Supreme Court in place of Sandra Day O'Connor...
...To the White House's four major power centers--the Domestic Policy Staff, Office of Management and Budget, the Counsellor to the President, and National Security Council-Carter added a fifth: the Mondale Vice Presidential office and staff...
...Bell's complaints about me antagonistic White House "power centers" in part reflect the conflict between President and Cabinet inherent in the parochial tendencies of the departments...
...G r i f f i n Bell may be remembered as the Great Smuggler of the Carter Administration...
...Now comes the second (after Joseph Califano's) of the Carter Administration memoirs, Taking Care of the Law, by former Attorney General Griffin B. Bell...
...Bell has a perpetual twinkle in his eye, as if he seems always aware of Henry Fielding's declaration, "Life everywhere furnishes an accurate observer with the ridiculous...
...recipient of a MacArthur Foundation grant for genius...
...Carter reacted with this cold handwritten note: "The Rodriguez case was/is very embarrassing to me...
...He is also a self-professed radical, the sort of guy who feels compelled to apologize for giving his book Kenneth Martin Stein is a free-lance writer based in New York City and Cambridge...
...Four years later, Carter became the first elected incumbent to lose the White House since the Depressionambushed Hoover...
...And a f t e r the Consumer Products Safety Commission classified auto batteries as a "household item," a car manufacturer had to a t t a c h a label to batteries in its cars warning customers not to drink the contents...
...tory law...
...I hope readers will remember him for his nobler books and pass over this misfire quickly, recalling it only for the good thoughts it so inadequately espouses...
...J.C...
...You must use the left leg of the Rhode Island Red rooster," he specified...
...With such works as The Informed Heart, The Uses of Enchantment, and the above-mentioned essay of Freud, he has earned the gratitude of those who, to use the terminology of one of his earlier writings, are determined to develop their consciousness of freedom...
...Bell puts the blame for Big Government squarely on Congress, whose subcommittees constitute "baronies or p r o t e c t o r a t e s " that gain power over the p e o p l e by the size of the bureaucracies and shape of the regulations they oversee...
...13.50 Eugene H. Methvin I n 1976a virtual unknown whose unlikely qualification was one term as governor of Georgia swept through the presidential caucuses and primaries to capture the Democratic nomination and the White House...
...It leaves me feeling somewhat like...
...Again, he does not explain why...
...One Iowa small businessman asked IRS how to fill out a required form and got 15 government booklets in response...
...author of two well-received books of essays on evolution, Ever Since Darwin and The Panda's Thumb...
...And when Bell went before the U.S...
...Bell presented the justices with the first genuine corpus delictiever in their history: a tiny snail darter preserved in a test tube...
...Bell details his thwarted attempt to kill the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, which poured federal dollars into Newark, home of House Judiciary Chairman Peter Rodino, and to move some Treasury Department law enforcement units to Justice...
...Had Jimmy Carter bested Ronald Reagan in November 1980, Griffin Bell almost certainly today would be sitting with his twinkling eye on the U.S...
...Bell's experience with the Carter Administration's passion for poll standings and reelection leads him to propose that the President serve a single six-year term...
...Note that verb: contribute...
...Ostrow William Morrow and Co...
...14.95 Kenneth Martin Stein Stephen J. Gould is a remarkable man: Professor of Geology at Harvard...
...renowned paleontologist...
...When the Potomac press corps bloodhounds scented the plot, Bell called a formal press conference to unveil the secret sausage recipe, which he solemnly explained requires chicken...
...Dale Bumpers's proposal to require the government to prove the validity of a regulation in court if a victimized citizen protests...
...The "regulatee" would thus be presumed innocent, and the regulator guilty, in a simple shift of the burden of evidence as it now exists in regula...
...He announces he will later this year join such worthies as William Simon, Milton Eisenhower, and Cyrus Vance in launching a bipartisan drive to persuade 34 state legislatures to petition for a constitutional convention to write such an amendment...
...It has its share of flaws, in logic and style, and certainly does not prove all that Gould claims, but still it is a compelling history of science and its abuse...
...That is where the C a r t e r group went wrong, trying to be all things to a l l - people...
...In the process, Bell reveals himself to be a conservative idealist who wandered for three years in the Potomac swamplands with a bevy of pragmatists, leftists, and careerists--and he now sounds like an angry but wiser Amos come out of the wilderness...
...so sexist a title...
...The speech was never made...
...His three major themes are overregulation, too much law, and the permanent bureaucracy "in Washington-the "Big Government" battle cries that elected Ronald Reagan: It would be difficult to overstate how serious a problem excessive government has become for our people . . . . We are regulating ourselves to death . . . . There is too much law abroad in the land, we are relying too heavily on our legal system to handle our problems . . . . We must return to government by directly accountable public officials--local, state and federal . . . . This ever-growing bureaucracy is more than a painful nuisance...
...How could a man who had won the nomination by defeating the Democratic/Washington THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1982 35 Establishment in the primaries with a conservative anti-Washington appeal choose this Hubert Humphrey acolyte...
...Instead, he wound up meeting with Hamilton Jordan, chief congressional lobbyist Frank Moore, Counsel Bob Lipshutz, and sometimes J ody Powell, to pick nominees to recommend to Carter...
...Just listen: Carter was ambushed by a "McGovern-Kennedy-Nader governmentEugene H. Methvin works in Washington D.C...
...government today...
...But they also reflect a conflict between the political instincts of Jimmy Carter and the idealism of Griffin Bell...
...He points out two fallacies that have pervaded scientific inquiries into intelligence, the hereditarian fallacy, i.e., the confusion of "heritable" with "inevitable," and that of THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1982 37...
...It almost cost him the 1976 election...
...Bell, while horrified by the crassness of the killing, agreed with subordinates that federal prosecution would be unfair and unwise under the particular circumstances...
...In victory, Carter embraced the Establishment he had run against...
...Sending crime memos to the P r e s i d e n t was like sending something to sea in a bottle...
...Bureaucracies would run out of things to do if they d i d n ' t have forms to be completed and processed...
...You were lucky ever to see them again," says Bell...
...That meant " t o avoid u p s e t t i n g anyone on the ultra left--the 5 or 10 per cent of the people who are on the f a r l e f t - - i n - stead of making a decision that would suit middle America, the people who suffer from crime . . . . You can't run the country for that small fringe...
...I t ' s forms and regulations that keep people on the payroll," he notes...
...This, he argues, is an "irrelevant, intellectually unsound, and highly injurious" task...
...And that's how the nation was saddled with what may prove to be Carter's worst legacy--a Carterized judiciary...
...Bell details and decries the devastating effects of the Carter-Mondaleliberal embrace...
...and winner of a National Book Critic's Circle award for his latest book, The Mismeasure of Man, a history of attempts to measure human intelligence...
...For the occasion Bell, decked out in his formal morning coat, smuggled in some genuine evidence to show the High Court, which as an appellate court had never before looked at evidence other than dirty movies...
...that old coun...
...in-waiting . . . people permanently entrenched in Washington," whom he "installed in the middle-level posts at the White House and some cabinet departments," says Bell...
...At one point be comes close to doing so, when he d e s c r i b e s his e f f o r t s to carry out C a r t e r ' s o r d e r for a formal crime message to Congress in 1978...
...try music song line: "My wife ran off with my best friend, and I sure do miss him...
...But he does not really explain it...
...as a senior editor of Reader's Digest...
...In one instance Carter, against his political inclination, was compelled by his campaign promises of an "independent" Justice Department to allow his attorney general not to prosecute a Houston cop who had been convicted by a Texas jury of maliciously murdering a MexicanAmerican but let off with a five-year sentence...
...Heah it is," he drawled, brandishing his fish like a beaming Huckleberry Finn...
...Hispanic-Americans cried for his head on a federal platter, and Carter prodded Bell to review the case personally...
...Indeed, he almost sounds like a rip-roaring Reaganite...
...Bell tried to get the Carter Administration to adopt Bumpers's idea, but in vain...
...I hope you made the right decision...
...Bell found this " a n outrageous intrusion" and "such a politicization of the process that I thought of resigning...
...But don't let this dissuade you from reading Mismeasure, for, as befits a remarkable man, Gould has written a remarkable book...
...We must guess the Carter political aides did not want to offend Capitol Hill barons whose power depends on overseeing these domains...
...Beyond the painful judgments on his own patron and associates, Bell pronounces a broad condemnation on the U.S...
...In Carter's last year the prime interest rate exceeded the President's popularity, which sank even lower in the polls than Nixon's at the time of his resignation and almost bumped into the inflation rate on the way down...
...I t was and is a safeguard against Washington's getting out of hand...
...Norton and Co...
...Supreme Court to argue a case, as attorneys general traditionally must, he chose the famous Tennessee Snail Darter case...
...Like a hardnosed prosecutor, Bell walks straight into the ring and hits 'em in the snoot with a first chapter entitled "What Went Wrong...
...TAKING CARE OF THE LAW Griftin B. Bell, with RonaldJ...
...The reason: The White House's competing groups, including the Mondale clique, had horripilations over doing a n y t h i n g they t h o u g h t might hurt politically...
...Bell gingerly refrains from saying that the ringmaster failed to crack the whip, for it is clear he maintains affection and admiration for Carter despite bruises and disappointment...
...The provision for a Constitutional Convention was probably the wisest single move of the Founding Fat h e r s , " says Bell...
...Their intramural vying, Bell says, "did contribute to the appearance of vacillating, indecisive leadership...
...star witness in the recent Arkansas "monkey" trial...
...Indeed, the oppression of Big Government moves this grandson of Confederate subversives to the hyperbolic h e i g h t of comparing-the f e d e r a l bureaucracy to the Union military occupation during Reconstruction...
...To circumvent the Secret Service food-tasters, he carried to a Cabinet meeting hidden in his briefcase a South Georgia delicacy known as rooster-pepper sausage for President Carter...
...Bell cites his alma mater, a small B a p t i s t u n i v e r s i t y in Georgia with fewer than 3,000 students, which had to spend close to t250,000 yearly to complete government-required reports...
...My dismay grew as C a r t e r kicked off his campaign at Warm Springs, Ga., with a speech suited p e r f e c t l y for 1936 FDR New Deal "lunch pail" politics--at a time when most Americans had quit c a r r y i n g lunch pails and were worrying about crabgrass, high t~lxes, and Big Government...
...Bell also lost on a more basic matter...
...To help cure the regulatory mess, Bell endorses Sen...
...When victimized citizens come as supplicants, the barons can then grant them relief and "assure the Congressmen of some 36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1982 indebted voters...
...I t is my thesis that a bureaucracy out of control was a chief contributor to President Carter's failure to govern as the people would have preferred," he declares...
...Gould's thesis is simple: Biological determinists, a nasty lot, have attempted to rank individuals and groups according to a single, innate quantity called intelligence...
...THE MISMEASURE OF MAN Stephen Jay Gould / W.W...
Vol. 15 • September 1982 • No. 9
