Liar's Poker

...y et despite the notoriety it gained him, it is clear in retrospect that Teller's testimony actually had very little to do with the outcome of the hearings...

...Both among his fellow scientists and the public at large, Teller was seen as the man who "betrayed" Oppenheimer and cost him his security clearance...

...I was also taken in by Bryson's occa- sionall self-deprecating modesty...

...19.95 Donna Rifkind BLACKVVELL BOOKS IN THE NEWS A History of West Germany Volume LFrom Shadow to Substance, 1945-1963 Volume H:Democracy and its Discontents, 1963-1988 DENNIS L BARK & DAVID IL GRESS "A work of impressive scholarship, comprehensive scope, and narrative power, which will doubtless be the standard history in English for years to come...

...The lava flow of money—in 1984 a single trader at Salomon made $100 million dollars trading mortgaged-backed bonds—produced a lot of strange beLIAR'S POKER: RISING THROUGH THE WRECKAGE ON WALL STREET Michael Lewis/W...

...As Blumberg and Panos point out, "Teller's words were far less damaging to Oppenheimer than both the actions and the words of Oppenheimer himself...

...History," they write, "has produced greater scientists and greater politicians, but it would be difficult to find one who has straddled both fields with such great effect on how humans live and, perhaps, on human survival...

...Bryson is prone to making the most outrageously superficial observations with no trace of irony or facetiousness...

...But he also asks what many politicians are going to wonder aloud if the economy ever gets into serious trouble: What exactly does all this high-velocity spinning of money by a handful of MBAs do for the rest of the economy...

...I wanted to see America...

...As Lewiscorrectly points out, if social contribution is the measure, the new breed of Wall Street trader would be billed rather than paid at the end of the year...

...He thought it was a danger-ous illusion to imagine that we could save humanity by proclaiming high moral principles from a position of military weakness...

...Michael Lewis's Liar's Poker is a very funny account of what it was like trading and selling bonds on Wall Street in the mid-eighties...

...So powerful, in fact, that today's generation of anti-SDI scientists is repeating—one assumes unconsciously—the same arguments used by Oppenheimer's generation to oppose the H-bomb...

...How does a distinguished historian come to write such psychobabble...

...If you weren't making a million dollars a year trading mortgages before age thirty, you were a defective human being...

...Lewis went through the training program at Salomon Brothers, which was the place to be back then, and then sold bonds in the firm's London office...

...But just as one does not begrudge the misbehavior of aristocrats in seventeenth-century France simply because it is so entertaining to read about, it is hard not to be amused at the late twentieth-century equivalent—the 26-yearold bond trader with no family, no mortgage, no responsibilities, just a job which gushes cash...

...As he explains it, every summer of his youth his father, "seized with a quietly maniacal urge to get out of the state and go on vacation," would load up the car and drag his family around the country...

...Gordon A. Craig, New York Review of Books Volume I: $34.95 cloth 632 pages Volume II: $34.95 cloth 584 pages Persuasion and Soviet Politics DAVID WEDGWOOD BENN This book provides the background essential for understanding the complexity of Soviet politics and the emergence of the new era of glasnost...

...The journey itself lends these books an unvarying linear structure and a uniformity of tone: there's a leisurely, rambling feel for time and space, with plenty of room for lyrical passages and a touch of melancholy here and there, when the writer gets nostalgic for the way he imagines America used to be...

...Lewis writes that on his first day at Salomon, "I didn't really imagine I was going to work, more as if I were going to collect lottery winnings...

...For all these reasons, it is difficult not to concur with the Blumberg-Panos verdict on Edward Teller...

...The Wall Street Journal "Encyclopedic in coverage, thoughtfully objective in presentation, and full of unexpected insights...

...rr he foundation of the trading fortunes made in the last decade was laid by, of all people, Lyndon Johnson, whose fiscal policies created mountains of debt, and Paul Volcker, who as head of the Federal Reserve in 1979 let short-term rates start to bounce around like a ping-pong ball...

...In his remarkable memoir, Disturbing the Universe, Dyson wrote, "Had Teller not appeared, the outcome of the hearing would almost certainly have been unaffected, and the moral force of Teller's position would not have been tainted...

...But if Teller turned out to be the principal victim of the Oppenheimer hearings, in a larger sense he has been victimized by the culture of liberalism—a culture which is perfectly willing to bomb "right-wing" totalitarians to smithereens, but invariably draws the line and recovers its sense of moral "complexity" whenever left-wing totalitarians are involved...

...This is also the judgment of the eminent physicist Freeman Dyson...

...Needless to say he doesn't find this town, but neither does he find much to get excited about...

...This is a book of very great importance...

...One can only conclude that Rhodes himself harbors an "irrational" hatred that verges on the "clinical"—a hatred of Edward Teller...

...People in the West, says Bryson, walk with a lope and look "vaguely suspicious and squinty, as if they think they might have to shoot you in a minute...

...In the event of a serious economic contraction, there could be a populist backlash against the hotshots who have grown rich by leveraging America...

...His narrative is engineered to include a maximum number of jokes, and I laughed at many of the most sophomoric ones, like this comment about the Pennsylvania Dutch in Lancaster County: "The Mennonites are named after a well-known brand of speed-stick deodorant...

...The answer is, not much...

...He is searching, as he admits, for the perfect small town, "a place of harmony and inDonna Rifkind is a writer living in New York City...

...18.95 George Sim Johnston THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1990 43 havior...

...The money which at that time showered on children barely out of business school is already receding into the mists of fable...

...But compared with, say, the coast road along the Sorrentine peninsula, it was perhaps a little tame...

...But most likely, the markets will finally impose their own discipline—traders will run out of hedges, the ziggurats of debt will begin to shake, and there will be a reckoning...

...In this very limited sense I would like to express a feeling that I would feel personally more secure if public matters would rest in other hands...

...There seems to be boundless enthu- siasm on the part of book publishers for bringing out accounts by people who have spent a lot of time driving around America...

...A pressure-cooker meritocracy, it was full of street-smart traders who might not pass muster at the Racquet Club, but who could clobber more tradition-bound firms when it came to pricing merchandise in the bond market...

...And suddenly, there was an unbelievable amount of merchandise, not simply from the leveraging of every sector of the economy, but from the new regulatory dispensation which allowed traders to make up any sort of security they liked—mortgage-backed bonds, leveraged preferreds, zero coupons, you name it—and sell it to investors who were usually a few weeks behind on the learning curve...

...Money and credit took on a life of George Sim Johnston is a writer living in New York City...

...At Salomon, the more money you made, the greater the license for adolescent behavior...

...I wanted to come home...

...And that case, too, bears a distinct resemblance to the case for the H-bomb: the Soviets are already working on it, they are well ahead of us in certain respects, and unless we catch up, we will be vulnerable to intimidation and blackmail...

...Can'ridge MA 02142 At your bookstore, or toil-free: (800) 443-6638 (NInsterCarcti lisa only) 44 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1990...

...Bill Bryson's The Lost Continent, the latest of these "on the road" books, is described on its dust jacket as the author's "sardonic account of his travels across thirty-eight states...

...I wanted to look for NeHi Pop and Burma Shave signs...

...The room never got built, but in the eighties a handful of trading rooms on Wall Street provided just that sort of recreation for hundreds of young men (women were never really invited) who had the opportunity to make staggering amounts of money in a professional environment not unlike "Animal House...

...Of southeast Iowa he says: "Compared with an afternoon in a darkened room, it wasn't bad...

...I wanted to see lightning bugs [Bryson continuesi, and hear 'cicadas shrill, and be inescapably immersed in that hot, crazy-making August weather that makes your underwear scoot up every crack and fissure and cling to you like latex, and drives mild-mannered men to pull out handguns in bars and light up the night with gunfire...

...Someday, when the yuppie has gone the way of the flapper, books like Liar's Poker will be read with the same incredulity as memoirs from the court of Louis XIV...

...Oppenheimer act . . . in a way which for me was exceedingly hard to understand...

...Ellen Mickiewicz, Former Chairperson, American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies $27.95 cloth 256 pages Sandinistas The Party and the Revolution DENNIS GILBERT "The most balanced and best-informed account yet published of the Nicaraguan revolutionary process...

...What exactly does Bryson see in America in the 1980s...

...Now in his mid-thirties, Bryson himself "became gripped with a curious urge to go back to the land of my youth and make what the blurb writers like to call a journey of discovery...

...As the old debate over the H-bomb demonstrated, and as the current debate over SDI confirms, this culture has a powerful hold on America's scientific community...

...Lewis's portrait-painting is hysterically funny, from the pizza-eating troglodytes at the mortgage desk to the trader who throws ten dollars at a colleague heading for the airport and asks him to buy some crash insurance because, "I just feel lucky...

...Where, by the way, Tom Wolfe did his homework for The Bonfire of the Vanities...

...Teller . . . was simple...

...The Reagan Administration, which had no taste for curbing any financial excess, be it leveraged buy-outs or the crap shooting of the S&L's, gave protective cover to traders who proceeded to take full advantage of the structural imbalances in the economy...

...And his assessment of the two great antagonists seems exactly right: "Oppenheimer .. . was confused and complicated...

...The West is a land of drifters, all looking to make fortunes as movie stars or rock stars or game-show contestants...

...I wanted to travel around...

...That sums up the era now drawing to a close on Wall Street...

...3 Cambridge Center...

...Salomon Brothers was in a terrific position for the feeding frenzy...

...But other things about The Lost Continent were less admirable...

...He wanted to be on good terms with the Washington generals and to be a savior of humanity at the same time...

...Little that makes his heart leap for joy...

...Thus, in a recent review of the Blumberg-Panos book in the New York Times, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Richard Rhodes declares, as though it were self-evident, that Teller's character suffers from "two peculiar defects": "a terror of Russia that is irrational enough to be termed clinical, and a corresponding grandiosity that makes him believe that anything is possible and nothing is unethical in the pursuit of an ever more elusive security...

...Leading the crusade...

...Indeed, many Sovietologists believe that it was the technological challenge posed by SDI that finally broke the Soviet economy's back, and forced a reluctant Gorbachev to embark on the path of reform...

...Until SDI is successfully tested and deployed, no one can answer this question for sure...

...As an alumnus of Salomon, albeit of the Corporate Finance Department, which may be glamorous to outsiders, but is regarded as a kind of statistics-gathering backwater by the traders with whom Lewis worked, I can vouch that he is not making anything up...

...Abraham Lowenthal, Foreign Affairs $13.95 paper $27.95 cloth 234 pages The Economic Consequences of Immigration JULIAN L. SIMON "(Simon) explodes virtually every popular dogma of the seal-the-borders brigade....he has been a lonely voice against a chorus of Malthusian population planners, development specialists and neo-Know Nothings...

...Dyson's opinion is especially valuable because he remained a friend of both Teller and Oppenheimer...

...Crossing Missouri, he wonders if the license-plate nickname "The Show-Me State" might mean "Show Me the Way to Any Other State...

...Teller's testimony created a tremendous sensation...

...against this liberal mindset is Edward Teller...

...Bryson is an American writer who lives in London and seems to feel qualified for publishing his observations about America because he comes from Des Moines and took long car trips with his family when he was a child...

...By now, the once-timid political novice has become a seasoned activist, using every trick in the book—from his bushy eyebrows, to his emphatic way of speaking, to his firm command of the facts —to make the case for SDI...

...But while SDI has yet to prove itself militarily, it has already more than vindicated itself politically...

...I s Teller as right about strategic de- l fense today as he was about thermonuclear weapons forty years ago...

...He finds Columbus, Mississippi, a "deeply pleasing and encouraging place," for instance, because THE LOST CONTINENT: TRAVELS IN SMALL-TOWN AMERICA Bill Bryson/Harper & Row/314 pp...

...In fact, the primary emotion he exhibits is boredom...

...T he faculty of the boarding school .i...

...W. Norton/249 pp...

...It was Michael Lewis's good luck to arrive at Salomon at the peak of its power and prosperity and observe the professional apoplexy in what was for a while probably the most exciting room in America—the trading floor on the 41st floor at One New York Plaza...

...Thus, we are told that SDI can never work, and that even if it can work it is morally wrong for the United States to build such a "destabilizing" new system—a system that will bring us closer to Armageddon...

...And why, in analyzing Teller's character, does he exclude the judgment of Andrei Sakharov, who expressed his "profound respect" for Teller...

...Very gracefully written—a pleasure to read....I hope those that forge policy will take it seriously...

...their own...

...Milton Friedman, The Hoover Institution $39.95 cloth 320 pages Tongues of Fire The Explosion of Protestantism in Latin America DAVID MARTIN One of the world's leading authorities on the sociology of religion examines the phenomenal spread of Evangelical Protestantism in Latin America and its cultural and political ramifications...

...It should be read by anyone interested in the condition and the future of the Americas, but also by anyone concerned with the relation of religion and social change throughout the world" —Peter L. Berger, Institute for the Study of Economic Culture $29.95 cloth 368 pages Basil Blackwell, Inc...

...When it comes to making shrewd generalizations," he admits at one point, "I am a cretin...

...Most of his academic colleagues broke off their contacts with Teller, and began a vendetta against him that continues today...

...It's clear that Bryson's exasperation is put on largely for easy laughs, and he does manage to be pretty funny about a lot of things...

...The most familiar of these accounts is probably John Steinbeck's Travels With Charley (1962), while perhaps the most popular recent example is William Least Heat Moon's Blue Highways (1982...

...It would be difficult to conceive of a more remote and cheerless state than Nevada," according to Bryson, and South Dakota is "the world's first drive-through sensory deprivation chamber...

...and if things don't work out they can always become a serial murderer...

...Teller's "simplicity," as Dyson calls it, cost him the esteem of most of his colleagues, and made him the Richard Nixon of nuclear physics: the scientist everyone loves to hate...

...dustry, a place without shopping malls and oceanic parking lots, without factories and drive-in churches, without Kwik-Kraps and Jiffi-Shits and commercial squalor from one end to the other...

...I attended once announced that, in order to provide an outlet for the energies of 400 male adolescents crawling up the walls in winter term, it was going to create a "crack up" room where the students could break things, scream at the top of their lungs, and indulge in other regressive behavior...