The Power Game
Smith, Hedrick
machine-gun emplacements is a little thoughtless. Many, perhaps most, of his flaws are those of a man who accords primacy to economics over the culture, who pursues his economic thesis...
...But, interestingly, these very weaknesses of Weaver's book also contribute heavily to its strengths...
...PAUL DUKE: How does Rick treat the question of ideological battles between the Republicans and Democrats...
...If, by the slightest chance, one cannot be a functioning intellectual in that world and criticize the corporations, then the con servative intellectual movement is not an intellectual movement, and it is time that this fact were known within their world...
...Needless to say, it paid no penalty for its role...
...HELEN WAN: Ah ha, ha, ha...
...Tonight we will focus on a new book about this wild and outrageous town, The Power Game, by our old friend and frequent colleague, Hedrick Smith, formerly of the New York Times...
...Wan puts down her butcher knife, cleans her glasses, fixes her hair, and smiles and nods at the camera...
...that he stood for anything...
...You're all great...
...Flaws and all, it is worth its weight in gold as a guarantor of the integrity of the conservative intellectual movement...
...HELEN WAN: Paul, I wanted to know if Jim Baker was married, and you didn't answer my question...
...He makes no effort to answer the question "Why...
...Scott Powell provides an exhaustive nuts and bolts account of IPS activities and influence, both direct and indirect...
...The panel sighs disconsolately, then smiles and nods at the camera...
...This time, the panel doesn't do anything but smile and nod at the camera...
...It was used to wage economic war against corporations...
...Rick was courting himself some disaster there-possibly the wrath of the New Right...
...To understand that is to understand something of vital importance-even if one does not quite know what to do about it...
...Actually, as David Horowitz points out in his splendid introduction, IPS was never really part of the New Left revolution, though it served as a haven for many New Left activists...
...HELEN WAN: Is he married...
...For example, he devotes sixty pages to budgeting and procurement problems at the Pentagon, and gives congressional aides most of the credit for cracking down on them...
...PAUL DUKE: Well, that's about as much time as we have for this edition of "Washington Week in Review...
...The panel applauds politely, then smiles and nods at the camera...
...Camera cuts to Smith's face• he swings,his head toward it, nods and smiles...
...CHARLES MacTROWEL: Whines, wasn't it extremely controversial and daring for Rick to suggest that Jim Baker is the single most.effective person in the Reagan Administration...
...and he is probably right to resist such tempting diversions...
...As Horowitz says: "IPS defined itself in terms that were characteristic not of the New Left, but of the old left...
...PAUL DUKE: Next week, we'll be discussing Henry Adams's Democracy...
...How does Rick portray the way power is handled in this bustling metropolis...
...It was able to trade on the trust policy makers automatically placed in think tanks...
...IPS obtained the Pentagon Papers more than a year before they were published by the New York Times, and their availability at the institute seems to have been widely known...
...CHARLES MacTROWEL: I'm sorry...
...CHARLES MadIROWEL: Helen, it stuns me that Rick thinks he's safe walking on the streets of Washington in broad daylight with talk that inflammatory...
...WHINES JOHNSON: When they're done by former White House chief of staff and current Treasury secretary Jim Baker...
...We also find the Congress in this town, not to mention, in this town, the media HEDRICK SMITH: Which has no liberal bias, according to a poll sponsored by the Times-Mirror Company...
...he sees the interrelationships of issues, people, money, and votes, and he marshals his own forces extremely well...
...As Arthur Waskow, an early IPS fellow, admitted, its peculiar blend of research and street activism placed it "on the bare edge of custom in the United States as to what an educational research institution is, as against what a political institution is...
...These burgeoned after World War II and were valued in Washington for their role in providing the long-range perspectives government officials simply did not have the freedom to consider, pressed as they were to deal with immediate problems...
...Wan sobs quickly, drops alive bunny into a pot of boiling water, then smiles and nods at the camera...
...They could damage your paperback sale...
...HEDRICK SMITH: That too...
...And, by the way, thanks, you guys...
...And I just want to say to my good friend Rick: Yea bo...
...CHARLES MacTROWEL :. Heh, heh, heh...
...to target specific countries...
...that his election, or any election, means anything...
...PAUL DUKE: What a delightful bit of Washingtoniana, Charlie...
...IPS defined its goal as nothing less than the "dismantling" of all our institutions, political, economic, and cultural...
...WHINES JOHNSON: Forest depletion is nothing to laugh about, Charlie...
...Thanks for joining us...
...But I do call Polsby a "keen observer" on page 90...
...CHARLES MacTROWEL: Want a cracker, Rick...
...No wonder all of us here at "Washington Week in Review" think it's such a stunning and original book...
...They were just terrific...
...Over the years, the chaotic, untidy, flexible, apparently spontaneous surface of IPS has reassured outsiders, deflecting attention from its substantive purposes...
...In all that space, he devotes perhaps three paragraphs to charges that the forty-four committees and subcommittees that perform some kind of oversight function of the Pentagon might be contributing to the problem...
...HEDRICK SMITH: I'm not...
...He has, in effect, conducted a century-long biopsy of a slice of tissue in a vital organ...
...WHINES JOHNSON: Maybe people decided that the things Rick is saying, Charlie, needed to be heard...
...As I interviewed Baker or watched him in action, the one word that kept coming to mind was control: self-control, control of the situation, control of others...
...A biopsy, by definition, is decontextualized: there is no body...
...It's a bold and courageous theory, Paul, and while many in America might scoff, there's some hardy souls around here who think it's done a good deal to restore a bit of sanity to the opinion climate in Washington...
...As Horowitz points out, Rubin was "a Communist Party member of the Stalin epoch...
...The research was put in service of the activism...
...Well, actually, I acknowledge only Malbin...
...Was that hard...
...HEDRICK SMITH: But on page 345 I say "Ideas do matter in politics...
...PAUL DUKE: And how is that, Whines...
...The funding base, like the agenda, has been provided by the old left-by the Samuel Rubin Foundation...
...El Scott Powell has written the first book-length study of the Institute for Policy Studies, often described as the chief institutional survivor of the 1960s counterculture...
...Anything that happens successfully in this book, Baker did it...
...After all, Rick's entire book explains how things really get done in Washington...
...HELEN WAN: Ah ha ha ha...
...In this town, Rick says, there is the President...
...But I have to say that such accusations seem questionable, since Rick acknowledges both Malbin and Polsby in the acknowledgments...
...For this reason, and no other, at the end of the decade, when the battalions of the New Left disintegrated in exhaustion and defeat, the Institute for Policy Studies survived...
...Rick's book is a 793-page whopper-almost as heavy as the Continuing Resolution, eh, Rick...
...HELEN WAN: Paul, a lot of people in this town are just going to be shocked by Rick's analysis of the way power is handled in this town...
...Powell describes how, in the aftermath of a clumsy FBI investigation of the institute, IPS sued, and was able to obtain a settlement exempting itself from any future FBI scrutiny...
...In this town...
...Apparently deciding the papers were legally too risky for the institute to publish, IPS played a major role in arranging for their ultimate disposition...
...From the first to the last page of this book, Weaver has proved down to the ground and beyond that the political and economic "thinking" of American Big Businessmen, on whom all of our lives do depend, has atrophied to a catastrophic degree...
...Since Weaver will antagonize conservatives more than any other group, his book is, in its way, a test case...
...It's the kind of book of which the sainted Sam Rayburn used to say, "Iffen ya cain't read the thang, jes' use it as a doorstopper...
...CHARLES MacTROWEL: Paul, it is the thesis of my brother Rick that the growth of congressional staffs in the last twenty years, coupled with changes in campaign financing and the loosening of party loyalties, have forever altered the nature of politics in America...
...What does Rick's book say about the changes in Washington politics...
...WHINES JOHNSON: Paul, what Rick understands-and what this program, if it does anything, proves week after week-is that ideas are extremely unimportant in politics...
...Finally, we'll discuss how Rick treats the ideological clashes between the Republicans and Democrats with the conscience of us all, Whines Johnson of the Washington Post...
...MacTrowell takes a piece of hay out from between his teeth, removes a cracker from the barrel next to him, and smiles and nods at the camera...
...IPS passed itself off as a think tank devoted to liberal values, i.e., to upholding the very Rael Jean Isaac's most recent book (with Erich Isaac) is The Coercive Utopians (Regnery Gateway...
...WHINES JOHNSON: The Continuing Resolution is nothing to laugh about, Paul...
...WHINES JOHNSON: Yes, you do, but thank God, you don't believe it...
...But a careful, scrupulous, analytically accurate biopsy by even the most reductionist scientist may bring information of life and death significance...
...HELEN WAN: Paul, Rick seems to think oversight is a very good thing...
...The Congress in this town covets that power...
...This is the first scholarly critique of the corporations by a qualified intellectual to emerge from the non-liberal, non-left world...
...PAUL DUKE: Whines Johnson, as the conscience of us all HEDRICK SMITH: You bet he is, Paul...
...HEDRICK SMITH: You bet I do, Paul...
...WHINES JOHNSON: It certainly was, Charlie, particularly because Jim Baker is the person most hated by the New Right...
...Rick has some interesting things to say about the way power is handled in Washington...
...There have also been reports from unnamed people who actually read things published on substances other than newspaper broadsheet that his ideas about campaign finance changes and party weakness come directly out of Consequences of Party Reform, a book by political scientist Nelson Polsby...
...Anti-reductionist readers who place primacy on the culture over economics, as do I, will all make variants of this criticism...
...and "How does it go COVERT CADRE: INSIDE THE INSTITUTE FOR POLICY STUDIES S. Steven Powell/Green Hill Publishers (Ottawa, IL)/$29.95 Rael Jean Isaac 46 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1988...
...HEDRICK SMITH: Ha, ha...
...Well done...
...Marcus Raskin and Richard Barnet, the founders of IPS, were former government bureaucrats, New Frontier Democrats, a type viewed with contempt by the New Left...
...HELEN WAN: In this town, Rick's book says, the President has a lot of power...
...HEDRICK SMITH: That would be just fine with me...
...PAUL DUKE: Helen Wan, you're an unmarried woman in her thirties who holds no brief for gay conservatives, as anyone knows who read your recent piece in Regardie's, "The Lavender Bund...
...Really...
...PAUL DUKE: I am terribly sorry...
...And so on...
...What's more, we're sure that the entire Washington press corps agrees with us...
...HEDRICK SMITH: You're sure right about that, Whines...
...Whew...
...We'll discuss Rick's view of the changes in Washington with our delightfully folksy chum Charles MacTrowel of the Richmond Times Dispatch...
...But the people inside the White House don't like that, and there's a lot of talk that the people inside other executive agencies don't THE POWER GAME: HOW WASHINGTON WORKS Hedrick Smith/Random House/$22.50 John Podhoretz THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1988 45 like it much either...
...And he takes 793 pages to say it...
...I am in profound agreement with Weaver when he says that if one is to defend the American productive system, one must be willing to criticize its flaws, indeed its evils, and to do so with the, intellectual vigor and probity one brings to one's critiques of other institutions...
...WHINES JOHNSON: I believe that by refusing to submit to the "buy guns, guns, guns, and more guns" drumbeating, Rick is nobly resisting the siren call and political imprecations of the New Right...
...Many, perhaps most, of his flaws are those of a man who accords primacy to economics over the culture, who pursues his economic thesis single-mindedly outside the complex historic, social, moral, scientific, and technological context, which leads him into a strongly expressed reductionism...
...CHARLES MacTROWEL: Well, shut my mouth, Paul...
...With this agenda and funding, IPS set out on what has been a remarkably successful effort to change the direction of the political culture...
...Now, not only do I and all my colleagues on this panel and in the Washington press corps believe that's true, but it has the added advantage of being so easy to understand and follow...
...You, on the other hand, will probably just buy it and never crack the binding...
...WHINES JOHNSON: I think the term "liberal bias" is a weapon in the hands of the New Right...
...Not knowing has no advantage over knowing...
...But to continue: The Power Game is the most comprehensive book written this decade about the workings of this once-sleepy Southern town that is also, many observers believe, the capital of the United States...
...HEDRICK SMITH: A man's gotta say what a man's gotta say, according to a senior White House official...
...In times of dire peril to the republic, people will at last take heed of a Cassandra...
...That's why I was able to keep myself from losing the track of my argument while I was cranking out all 793 pages...
...Johnson glowers and nods at the camera...
...To sum up: Hedrick Smith's The Power Game says that Watergate-era party and congressional reforms have forever changed the way politics operates in Washington, that Congress and the President fight for power, and that ideas have no importance whatever in the making, fashioning, or discussing of public or foreign policy...
...Really...
...She first wrote about the Institute for Policy Studies in 1980 for Midstream magazine...
...You do not get the sense from this book that Ronald Reagan was elected by the American people to do anything...
...PAUL DUKE: Just to play devil's advocate for a moment, here, Charlie: I've heard that some people are hinting that much of what Rick says about congressional staffs is very similar to the ideas expressed in a book by American Enterprise Institute scholar Michael Malbin called Unelected Representatives...
...we'll analyze that in some detail with our very own journalistic version of Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction, Helen Wan of the Wall Street Journal...
...Here's how Rick describes Jim Baker: "Baker is smart, cautious, patient and decisive...
...The panel gasps, then smiles and nods at the camera...
...I hope that conservatives can tear their eyes away from their standard repertoireswith which even the editor of this journal has professed himself bored-long enough to grasp what an immense gift Weaver has bestowed on them...
...All you get is the sense that manipulators and maneuverers run politics, policy, and set the national agenda...
...WHINES JOHNSON: I just want to say that it is very dangerous to cross the New Right...
...Instead, Powell answers such practical questions as, "What are IPS targets...
...He is savvy...
...It seriously tests the proposition that there is authentic intellectual freedom within the center to right world...
...WHINES JOHNSON: In addition, manipulators and maneuverers are shown in their rightful light: as kind of sexy...
...0 PAUL DUKE: Good evening, I'm Paul Duke, and this is a special parody edition of "Washington Week in Review...
...Certainly IPS has run rings around the political establishment...
...system whose demise it sought...
...PAUL DUKE: Helen, where does Rick's book come down on the question of congressional oversight of executive authority...
...You sure have cleared out some forests with this tome...
...to help revolutionary groups in the field..IPS's Transnational Institute in Amsterdam, for example, played host to "liberation movements" which provided a shopping list of research needs...
...Everybody's been just terrific...
...I can't answer such charges, because I am a newsman and therefore maintain a heroic and godlike objectivity at all times...
...He must be making a lot of enemies...
...HELEN WAN: Charlie, wasn't it extremely dangerous for Rick to come out and say such incredibly controversial and biting things about the changing nature of power in America...
...From the first to the last page of this book, Weaver has proved down to the ground and beyond that the political and economic "thinkdeath significance...
...Charlie, you've been a resident of this burg for more years than most seventeen-year-olds today can count up John Podhoretz, a frequent contributor, pays his own form of tribute in this review to the recent Supreme Court decision affirming First Amendment protections of parody...
...I WON'T BE IGNORED, PAUL...
...Not knowing can kill you...
...CHARLES MacTROWEL: I'm about fixed to agree with you, Helen...
...HEDRICK SMITH: Jim Baker was just terrific...
Vol. 21 • June 1988 • No. 6
