Culture and Politics

...Frankfort is obsessed with her own feminism, lapsing into animadversions on male chauvinism and female docility, and celebrations of feminist rebellion...

...The political tale shakes down mainly to the story of the struggle between the author and Senator Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island...

...When time came for Berman's reappointment, the lawmaker mounted a campaign to block the nomination, and though he lost some skirmishes to Berman's supporters, he was finally victorious, holding off hearings until after the presidential elections when Jimmy Carter's success spelled Betman's downfall...

...According to information THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1984 43...

...These efforts won wide public acclaim, but they did not mollify Senator Pell...

...Mary's College o f Maryland and author o f the column "An Idea o f Freedom...

...As he says, "As far as I could see it was preferable to consider the general public as an audience rather than as a collection of potential grantees...

...She scorns his cushy Greenwich village life-style: Town houses, summer homes, seeing two kids through private school, Ivy League college and graduate school, frequent travels abroad, and tailored suits from Saville Row--these are the hallmarks of a certain class of Northeast Intellectual Leftists...

...Given Berman's assumptions, it was perhaps inevitable that he would view his tenure at the NEH as something of a rear guard action...

...This vivid bit of reporting is lifted from Thomas Powers's 1971 opus, Diana: The Making of a Terrorist, source for most of Frankfort's factual detail on the early days...

...01-734 0592) SURVEY Subscription Office: 59 St...

...What is one to do with this contradiction: One's father is known throughout Leftist circles for his high ideals as well as his charm and wit...

...Berman, who describes himself This issue includes The Plot to Kill the Pope by Paul Henze which examines the evidence on the case and Soviet media treatment o f it...

...His tepid defense of the practice, which amounts to little more than the excuse that since the bureaucracy is in place anyway it might as well be run sensibly, serves basically to confuse the more principled arguments he makes when he gets around to discussing theoretical aspects of his topic...

...What bedeviled Berman during his term at the NEH and eventually left him with sour memories was the ageold struggle between aristocratic and popular taste...

...Berman had been more forthright in analyzing the shortcomings of popular impulse...

...Was the plot directed from the KGB Department of " Wet Affairs "7 SURVEY provides an analysis of the historical background to Soviet techniques of terrorism and assassination abroad and explores Soviet disinformation practices...

...Martin's Lane, London WC2N 4JS, England (Tel...

...Instead he pushed for projects of large public impact, such as the exhibition of the Unicorn Tapestries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the filming of "The Adams Family Chronicle," which proved to be immensely popular when shown on television in January 1976...

...The first of these I found to be more interesting and valuable than the second...

...It is the purpose of the humanities to cherish the best that humans have thought and done whereas it is the purpose of government, commonly, to reward politicians, and, at best, to cater to mankind's middling aspirations...

...But Frankfort sees in his prominence the seeds of the daughter's "rebellion...

...The press usually describes Kathy's father as a "renowned civil liberties lawyer...

...Seems to me that Frankfort is letting old man Boudin off easy...

...No, his main difficulty was 42 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1984 an inability to hold off demands for pursuits he deemed unsuitable...

...At one point, she recalls that the sixties produced a mythic figure, "The Earth Mother," celebrated with Eugene H. Methvin is senior editor of Reader's Digest...

...They escaped in two cars and a rented U-Haul van, but four miles away encountered a roadblock...

...A swashbuckling, bonafide feminatic who now lives in a "country compound" or feminist commune near Sag Harbor, N.Y., Frankfort was one of the founders of the Feminist Review, along with Kathy Boudin's poet-pacifist mother, and one of her previous books was Vaginal Politics...

...His assertion that "the essence of the humanities is not charity: it is style," reveals a mind-set unlikely to fit easily with the coarse wheeling and dealing of American politics...

...Through her, Frankfort generates real rage and condemnation for the crime of Boudin and her comrades, and against Boudin personally for her role in disarming the cops at the roadblock by playing innocent young lady frightened at the sight of guns--while the terrorists in her truck prepared t o storm out, automatics blazing...

...Pell's actions were regrettable, but they point to a lesson Berman seems only partially to have learned: to wit, in Washington being right will get you nowhere...

...The problem was not that be couldn't find an audience for high-quality productions...

...when author Ronald Berman was its chairman...

...He sees Pell as a dishonorable man, and with good reason if it is true that the senator did all the things Berman attributes to him...

...I wish Mr...

...The only "freedom fighter" captured at the scene turned out to be Kathy Boudin, one of the 1969 founders of the terrorist "Weather Underground" spinoff of the Students for a Democratic Society, and a magna cum laude alumna of Bryn Mawr and the FBI's "Most Wanted" list...

...Yet the treatise to some extent justifies its name, for the debate over the distribution of funds from a federal agency charged with supporting the humanistic disciplines goes to the heart of the relationship between government and the verbal arts...

...11-836 4194) as "a conservative reasonably equipped with morals and ideas," spends only a few pages on the question of whether the public should be taxed to support activities it cannot define...

...Moscow's Disenchantment with l r a n Prospects in Africa Annual subscription: UKs US $39 Elsewhere s Single copics: lJK s US $10 SURVEY Editorial Office: llford House, 133 Oxford Street, London WI R lTD, England (Tcl...

...To Berman that would have been piddling the Endowment's funds away to no effect...

...They killed a guard and wounded two others...

...And Berman knows that whatever validity the proposition might have in an assessment taking all human endeavor into account, it is worthless as a prescription for the mundane ills of the citizenry...

...The response to the Unicorn Tapestries showed that he could...

...The fiendish guards would, for example, bang on her cell door in the middle of the night, then laugh about their devilishness...

...Berman seems to recognize the dangers of a mass culture fueled by government money, and, in fact, to be fundamentally pessimistic about it...

...F r a n k f o r t reserves her final 21 pages to consider "What Went Wrong...

...She was a friend of Boudin's family, her father a prominent radical lawyer, moving in the same Greenwich Village leftist set...

...It also surveys the overall context of present Soviet strategy in world affairs, focusing on some sensitive points in the global balance of power: The USSR and the UN Central America and the Lessons of Vietnam De-coupling the Allies: Northern Europe and Japan The Soviet Union, China and Cambodia Will the Soviets Pull Out of Afghanistan...

...Of her 165 text pages, Frankfort expends 127 describing the robbery and ensuing trials and ramifications...

...Something about Berman put Pell into a snit, and he used the large prerogatives of his office unfairly to squash a noncompliant bureaucrat...

...I knew some of the more intimate aspects of their lives," she tells us...

...And would you believe that, in her opinion, Kathy Boudin was rebelling against male dominance in her own truly idealistic, honest-to-Marx leftist household...

...It seems Nyack jailers were inclined to wreak some punishment of their own upon terrorists who had killed two of their town's 22 policemen, including the only black on the force, a highly popular veteran officer...

...Leonard Boudin, it appears, was no idealistic c i v i l libertarian, but an old-time Stalinist, hired later by the Castro government...

...For years my social and professional life overlapped that of the Boudins...

...He could have done better to explore the issue more fully...

...Berman recounts the struggle over the renomination in a bemused and witty tone, but it is obvious that the senator's behavior still rankles him...

...They killed two policemen and in the confusion escaped again...

...She recounts that in the 1969-70 period when the Weather Undergrounders were leaving the old splintered SDS, the new young middleclass "revolutionaries" were so eager to stamp out their "bourgeois inhibitions" one underground cell even killed and cooked and ate an alley cat...

...That would have allowed him to offer a sharper definition of the humanities, and to contrast more definitely the rewards of humanistic attainment with the aims of government...

...The book is composed of two disparate discourses: one an explanation of how the federal government actually works, and the other a philosophic essay on the nature of the humanities and on Berman's attempts to translate that nature into policy at the NEH...

...Let me mention a Washington Post news clip she has either missed or omitted...

...Thirteen of these pages comprise a verbatim reprinting of Boudin's affidavit describing and protesting conditions in the Rockland County hoosegow...

...What the senator wanted from the agency was not high culture but rather a sprinkling of small grants to ordinary citizens...

...birthings at home in the commune among children, pets, and many bearded men who would mark the occasion with a "placenta stew that was eaten in tribal fashion after it was separated from the newborn child and mixed with a little wine...

...What such delectable detail has to do with the Nyack terrorist gang or Boudin is beyond me, but one other culinary note is relevant, even if not a Frankfort original...

...I n the end, however, Berman's frustratio~ arose less from the crudity of the political system than from the presuppositions of the American people...

...On October 20, 1981, in Nyack, N.Y., twenty miles up the Hudson River from Manhattan, a gang of about a dozen black and white "revolutionaries" robbed a Brink's armored "truck of $1.6 million...

...Thus, says Frankfort, Kathy was caught in a double bind, "the gap between the father's personal behavior and his idealistic politics...

...Though Berman tries mightily to paint the senator's opposition as inexplicably irrational, it doesn't take much reading between the lines to see that Pell considered the NEH chairman to be an intellectual snob...

...At one point he remarks, "I believe actually t h a t . . , in the near future the nation will in a rudimentary way be literate with computers and in a curtailed language of general expressiveness, and pretty much unfamiliar with either the books or the art that ar~ usually thought to be basic to our character and values...

...The most memorable motif of the book is Berman's wry commentary upon Pell's suggestion that money be given to lumberjacks and shoemakers so they could pursue their humanistic interests after a hard day in the forest or shop...

...A federal judge told the jailers to knock it off, and Boudin was transferred to state custody...

...Yet when it comes to women, his behavior is no different than that of any man regardless of his politics...

...Very little here could not be gleaned from newspaper clip files...

...C u l t u r e and Politics, despite its sweeping title, consists solely of an account of the National Endowment for the Humanities from 1972 until 1976 John R. Turner is Director of Continuing Education at St...

...There were so many requests to fund discussions on topics like "the government and the family" or "the crisis of divorce," he couldn't always keep his scorn prudently hidden...

...And that, in turn, indicates the most serious drawback to seeking government support for the humanities...

...As be'skillfully attests in his final chapter, the general populace has been won by the notion that education and culture promote goodness...

...The one nice piece of original reporting is Frankfort's sensitive narration of the story of Mary La Porta, commonlaw wife of Chipper Brown, the murdered black cop...

...Yet, as it stands, Culture and Politics provides an unmistakable, if unintended, sermon to the effect that when government attempts to enhance endeavors that rise only out of individual freedom, the results are mixed at best, and probably cost more than we should be willing to pay...

...In Ellen Frankfort, Boudin has a worthy chronicler...