Breaking Barriers
Rowan, Carl T.
BREAKING BARRIERS: A MEMOIR Carl T. Rowan/Little, Brown/395 pp. $22.95 Brock Yates It was with considerable enthusiasm that the American Left received the memoirs of noted social climber,...
...Hardcover $20.00 Paperback $8.00 NEW POLITICAL SERMONS OF THE AMERICAN FOUNDING ERA: 1730-1805 Edited by Ellis Sandoz "Professor Sandoz has provided a superb collection of sermons bearing on the politics of the era of the American Revolution and the earlyRepublic...
...Carl T. Rowan plugged a "strapping young man" named Ben N. Smith who was gallivanting around his swimming pool in the wee morning hours...
...His big break came in Minneapolis, where he hooked on with the Tribune and became a favorite of its liberal owners, John Cowles and his wife Betty...
...On one occasion he felt "little knots of doubt in my stomach...
...The book is laced with notations about various meals he enjoyed during his lifetime, from the black-eyed peas and fried rabbit of his poverty-laced childhood in McMinnville, Tennessee, to civet de lapin at Washington's tony Sans Souci restaurant...
...Foreword, acknowledgments, editor's note, bibliography, chronology...
...Some of his bouts with food and drink were less than successful, including an assault of "Delhi Belly" during a tour of India with Lyndon Johnson...
...I was simply escaping a sinking ship...
...214 + xiii pages...
...A vociferous opponent of handguns, Rowan not only drilled Smith in anger, but got him with an unregistered weapon...
...We learn, for the umpteenth time, that LBJ was crude, manipulative, and combative, yet obliquely concerned about the nation's underprivileged...
...Rowan determined that his future lay in journalism, where his pugnacious ("I'm not going to take any shit off anybody") attitude complemented his writing skills...
...22.95 Brock Yates It was with considerable enthusiasm that the American Left received the memoirs of noted social climber, epicurian, and backyard plinker Carl T. Rowan...
...was, is and must go, read this book and laugh, weep and curse . . . and hope and dream...
...This incident is treated at length while Rowan glides past the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban missile crisis, the civil rights marches, the Kennedy assassination, etc...
...y et Rowan is, by most measurements, a self-made man with some noteworthy credentials...
...Now, fifty-five of the most revealing political sermons have been made available in modernized and newly typeset form...
...Here is social and intellectual criticism at its best, from a thinker who will surely climb in due course to his proper place in the American pantheon...
...Rowan was hailed again in 1954 for his wide-ranging dispatches from the Far East, where he met Nehru and Chou En Lai...
...This is an understandable position for such gold-plated autobiographers as Donald Trump or Lee Iacocca, but how does it square with the values of a man who has made a career out of baying sophistries on behalf of the world's underprivileged...
...The choicest segment of Breaking Barriers (and no doubt the one that inspired Little, Brown to commission the project in the first place) begins, "It was a few minutes before 2:00 a.m...
...Please allow approximately 4 weeks for delivery...
...Rowan's loose-limbed autobiography mercifully comes to a screeching halt after his ascension to syndicated punditry, save for an anti-Reagan anecdote that serves only as veiled bragging about his presidency of Washington's Gridiron Club...
...He was to be paid handsomely for his efforts—in the main to bleat about racial injustice from upper Northwest Washington and his second home in Boca Raton...
...All in all, this is one of the most useful collections of sources available for the study of the young United States...
...Yet in an earlierchapter he pronounces "I and other Negroes [sic] want no special favors, just the right to rise and fall on merit...
...But consider other goliaths of the press who have stepped up to cheer Rowan's efforts: Helen Thomas, the aged baglady of political orthodoxy, whose last original question at a White House press conference was posed during the Harding Administration, noted, "In a sea of conservatism he has held the liberal banner high for the disadvantaged and the afflicted...
...During much of the period when Martin Luther King, Jr., Medgar Evars, and James Meredith were in fact being shot, beaten, and humiliated, Rowan was viewing the proceedings from such racial hot spots as Minneapolis and Helsinki...
...Of course, Mr...
...1598 + xxxviii pages...
...On the one hand he moans that "chains of bondage" are "invisible," transforming minorities into "slaves without shackles...
...Rowan was let off the hook by a hung jury and has since returned to his pontifications on the subject of weaponry in the hands of the public...
...Rowan claimshe was aiming at Smith's foot but instead nicked him in the hand...
...Rowan states that he was "never willing to make a hundred bucks if I could make thousands," and his reluctance to stand by Johnson when America's international reputation was fraying tends to confirm his statement...
...King, undefeated flyweight champion of the electronic media, might be dismissed as a mere toady in more serious circles...
...All orders from outside the United States must be prepaid in U. . dollars...
...Two years later he was awarded Sigma Delta Chi's Best General Reporting Prize for "Jim Crow's Last Stand...
...NEW FROM LIBERTY FUND, INC...
...Hardcover Paperback 0-86597-092-0 0-86597-093-9 LibertyPress, 1991 0-86597-086-6 0-86597-087-4 LibertyPress 1990 ^ Enclosed is my check or money order made payable to Liberty Fund, Inc...
...Nineteen fifty-three also gained him inclusion in the Junior Chamber of Commerce's list of ten outstanding American young men, along with Billy Sol Estes...
...The reader learns that at various times Rowan's heart raced "100 miles a minute," and he describes how "sweat was running from my armpits to my waist...
...For anyone seeking insight into those events, back issues of Life would be considerably more enlightening than Rowan's cursory recollections...
...Overall, his description of major black figures is fragmentary at best...
...MasterCard and Visa accepted for a handling charge of $2.50...
...Department GG 114 7440 North Shadeland Avenue Indianapolis, IN 46250 Hardcover Paperback $38.00 $12.00 0-86597-090-4 0-86597-091-2 LibertyPress 1990 Please send me: Quantity Title Edition Price Amount The State of the Union Hardcover $20.00 Paperback $ 7.50 The Rationale of Central Banking Hardcover $20.00 Paperback $ 8.00 Political Sermons Paperback $12.00 Subtotal Indiana residents add 5% sales tax Total We pay book rate postage on prepaid orders...
...Jacques Barzun "Albert Jay Nock has a charming way of becoming an event in a person's life...
...Either this hypocrisy eludes the author or he chooses to ignore it, as he does Watergate, the Nixon resignation, the energy crisis, and the collapse of Communism...
...Milton Friedman, Hoover Institution This work gives a balanced and perceptive account of the 19th-century debates over central banking versus free banking through an historical survey of the arguments in England, Scotland, France, Germany, and the United States...
...His fevered attempts at justification border on the hilarious...
...THE STATE OF THE UNION: Essays in Social Criticism By Albert Jay Nock Edited and with a Foreword by Charles H. Hamilton "In a time of raucous and often mindless debate, it is a double pleasure to read Albert J. Nock— for what he says and for the way he says it...
...Presumably that merit involves the muscle of the federal government...
...The author reveals himself as a streetwise scrivener with a single goal: a quick climb up the ladder to financial and social status...
...Robert Middlekauff, The Huntington Library The political culture of this country was formed, refined, and transmitted by the political sermon—the "pulpit of the American Revolution...
...Worse yet, his "blood boils" and several situations were "gut-wrenching...
...Rowan did, in 1955, write the biography of baseball superstar Jackie Robinson, although he dismisses the effort in a single sentence...
...Al Neuharth, understudy press lord and boardroom hitman, trumpeted, "If you want a gutsy, moving chronicle of where the United States Brock Yates is editor-at-large of Car and Driver magazine...
...Name Address City State/Zip Mail to: LIBERTY FUND, INC...
...Hardcover $38.00 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1991 49 There seems little doubt that, had not Rowan done his O.K...
...Three of the final four chapters are inane essays that have little or nothing to do with the subject's life and times...
...During this period, one is exposed to Rowan's great personal drama: that of attempting to join Washington's exclusive Cosmos Club, which resulted in his being blackballed...
...While other prominent blacks were trading punches and writs with such Southern luminaries as Bull Connor and Ross Barnett, Rowan was in Washington perfecting his golf swing (a four handicap), rooting for his beloved Redskins, and developing a cozy but contentious relationship with Lyndon Johnson...
...This can be corrected only by quota hiring, affirmative action scholarships, and other social engineering...
...His writings unleash the instinct for the humane life and sow the seeds of self-education which, after all, is the only kind of education there is...
...He notes that his departure from the USIA represented "no pot of gold...
...index...
...Carl T. Rowan drives a Lincoln...
...But he appears to have witnessed the rising brutality against his fellow blacks largely from the tranquility of Minnesota...
...He candidly admits that he "sensed that most great career decisions were not made in the office, but over drinks, lunch and dinner...
...He was raised in dirt-floor Southern poverty by afamily beaten into submission by the racism of the twenties and thirties...
...The delicious tale is well known...
...By the early 1960s, Rowan had found his niche in the lily-white Washington establishment, first as a State Department press spokesman, then, in 1963, as the ambassador to Finland...
...Rowan rambles about such childhood goodies as his father's Rocky Mountain oysters (which he disdained) to Finnish reindeer meat (acceptable) to elite Washington journalist Marguerite Higgins's beef ragout—which gets two rave mentions...
...That fawning nocturnal gasbag Larry King celebrated the publication by oozing that the book is "brilliant, five years in the writing and well worth the wait...
...on June 14, 1988, that I was awakened by the noise of someone tampering with my bedroom window...
...Couple this dyspepsia with his decidedly moldy liberal diet, and one is led to conclude that this quasi-memoir might be more aptly titled "Breaking Wind...
...Two of them relate the sins of Ronald Reagan and assorted conservatives...
...R owan checked out of the Johnson Administration in August 1965 to begin a thrice-weekly column with the Chicago Sun Times...
...The one important thing we learn about Rowan is that he eats well...
...Rowan describes himself as the quintessential upwardly mobile professional, willing to make serious sacrifices in the 48 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1991 name of fame and fortune...
...Oh, yes...
...This was more than simple tokenism...
...At one point he was struck with a fright so great that "my heart creased my scalp...
...His quick mind manifested itself early, and he was able to complete his education at Tennessee State and Oberlin College—with a hiatus in the North Atlantic as one of the first twenty black officers in the Navy during World War II...
...Rowan proved himself to be a probing professional reporter, and gained national prominence in 1951 with eighteen stories on the racial climate in the South...
...He claims that Helsinki was the Cold War counterpart of World War II Lisbon and feebly tries to position himself as a key State Department operative...
...But for Rowan, who has gotten fat weeping crocodile tears for the Black Brothers he abandoned for the cozy Beltway establishment, it is another example of the duplicity of those whom Mario Procaccino once denounced as "limousine liberals...
...It was the brash Texan who appointed Rowan to his highest government position, director of the United States Information Agency, in 1964, and who is the subject of the lengthiest anecdotage...
...It was during this period, however, that Rowan appeared slowly to distance himself from the increasingly violent civil rights movement...
...Even the governor of Virginia, L. Douglas Wilder, said that Rowan had written "a poignant, powerful tribute to men and women who bled and died to deliver a measure of political power to black Americans...
...Yet, while others of his race were bleeding and dying, Rowan was craftily greasing his way into the white establishment while taking long, soulful, backward glances at his less fortunate countrymen...
...It might be called the American Way...
...Foreword, preface, appendix, bibliography, index...
...Corral impression, this book would have remained mercifully unpublished...
...Please send me a copy of your current catalogue...
...Edmund A. Optiz, Foundation for Economic Education Foreword, selected bibliography, acknowledgments, $20.00 $7.50 Also Available THE RATIONALE OF CENTRAL BANKING By Vera C. Smith Foreword by Leland B. Yeager "Vera Smith's book remains an authoritative and accurate summary of the theoretical arguments for and against free banking, a subject that has recently received renewed attention...
...There is little to criticize about such a motivation...
...340 + xxx pages...
...The dogma is so lugubrious and shopworn that even a dinosaur like Rowan ought to be embarrassed to repeat it...
...He met the major figures, including young Martin Luther King, Jr., and in 1955 took an uneventful ride on a Montgomery, Alabama, city bus...
...Yet one amusing sidelight comes as Rowan arm-wrestles himself over the issue of affirmative action...
Vol. 24 • May 1991 • No. 5
