Two Lucky People

...For those of us who know the Friedmans by their popular economic works and policy advocacy, the book is a reminder that their highest priority was always scholarship and academe...

...A.J...

...They let us know, for example, that they are both secular Jews who were married in a religious ceremony in deference to the feelings of Rose's observant parents...

...Or something like that...

...It's not nostalgia, of course...

...In typically matter-of-fact fashion, Friedman recounts looking up Cowperthwaite for the first time during a flying visit in 1955: I then managed to get an appointment with the financial secretary of Hong Kong, John (now Sir John) Cowperthwaite, a memorable meeting that marked the beginning of a long acquaintance...

...So unassuming is the tone that even though the FriedLucky the Nation That Has Such People 74 September 1998 • The American Spectator mans spell out the many battles in the war of ideas it is next to impossible to appreciate, without having lived through it, just how controversial their ideas were at the time...

...There is a reference to a trip with Bill Buckley and discussions of Catholicism, but nothing of their reaction...

...Depending on the interpreter, his three-year exile from boxing for refusing to fight for his country in Vietnam transJOHN LILLY is co-owner of Libreria Vertice, a bookstore in Seville, Spain...

...Materially, the wonders of science and enterprise have greatly enriched the world—though some products of science, like atomic energy, have been a mixed blessing...

...Irving Berlin captured this in song...

...In short order Friedman attacked the Pudong area of Shanghai championed by Deng Xiaoping as "a Potemkin village built for a reigning emperor," growled about a Peking which continued to look to Japan for an economic model despite having Hong Kong on its doorstep, and held up a business card from an official he'd met that listed five or six private side businesses in the upper left-hand corner, calling the mix of government and business "an absolute prescription for corruption...

...At times there are tantalizing clues to their wider world-view, including Rose's take on modern feminism and Milton's on multiculturalism, but the Friedmans typically recover quickly...

...The winter before, Ali had declared that his status as a minister for the Nation of Islam made him exempt from military service, asserting to the press, "I don't have no quarrel with those Vietcongs...

...For though Friedman did succeed in seeing his ideas replace the dominant Keynesian orthodoxy of his youth, professional recognition rather lagged behind...

...According to Parks, the young star ended up drafting him as a sort of image Feat of Clay: The Making of the Ali Myth 76 September 199 8 • The American Spectator...

...Act rushed to Friedman's table—seeking his autograph...

...Well, yes and no...

...And when he lit the torch at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, the poignancy of his physical debility was not lost on his fellow baby-boomers, for whom he perhaps represented their own impending fade-out...

...and the Fried-mans in writings and professional work of more than half a century...

...Two Lucky People strikes a similar note...

...second, that monetary policy affects the real economy...

...Like other fans, I would like to have seen a little more of the passion behind the economics, maybe some of the hand-rubbing Cowperthwaite noted...

...Most of their friends seem to be economists, and after a few chapters it becomes clear that the phrase "a competent economist" is, coming from the Friedmans, akin to a public kiss on both cheeks from de Gaulle...

...Cowperthwaite my puzzle [the link between the Hong Kong dollar and pound sterling...

...And it should remind us that the term "the dismal science" is a misnomer, in that it is precisely the market's champions who are at pains to emphasize man's capabilities and not his limitations...

...Even their title, a bald statement of fact, carries with it the whiff of Gershwin...

...In the interests of what is lately called full disclosure I should state that I'm getting a procurement bonus from the French Foreign Legion for every man who reads it...

...But there is little of the hand-rubbing that Cowperthwaite mentions...

...Few monarchs of ancient times could have lived as well as we have....The situation is less clear-cut in the social realm...

...But he also offers a fair analysis of Clay's "skittering style, like a pebble scaled over water," even if in the process he makes the oft-repeated and mistaken claim that the boxer lacked power and "seemed to make only glancing contact...

...I n his own memoirs, James Cagney revealed that though he was known for his gangster roles what he really considered himself was a hoofer...

...As they recount the extraordinary course of two lives spent extending the realm of human freedom, they are brilliant enough to know which direction we must ever choose for material progress...

...If economists are to have groupies, I suppose it is only fitting that they be in Hong Kong...

...Although bagging the Nobel undoubtedly helped spread his ideas it also meant "getting used to being ushered in to the head table via the kitchen or some other indirect route in order to avoid the small bands of protesters massed in front...

...Rather, he went to deliver a series of lectures sponsored by Banco Hipotecario, a private bank...

...The Nobel Prize came in 1976, when he was already 66 years old, and today the furor the prize generated seems from another eon...

...Oki formed his militancy into martyrdom or treason...

...I then said something like, "But the people at the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank don't understand how it works," doubtless listing all the other economists I had discussed the issue with...

...We can see the handwriting on the wall, except that it's on letterheads...

...And wise enough to hint, however softly, that it may not be enough...

...Defenses of Ali's right to practice his religion figure heavily in pieces by Jackie Robinson, Gordon Parks, and—of all people — a gentlemanly Floyd Patterson, whom Ali mercilessly taunted for his adherence to Roman Catholicism before knocking him out in Las Vegas in 1965...

...But the Fried-mans keep to themselves here...

...Written in sections alternately by Milton and Rose, it chronicles their life in considerable detail: We learn of Rose's first roast, Milton's first attempted kiss (which Rose declined), the plumbing on their summer house, etc...

...77 met with Pinochet for 45 minutes, whereupon the general listened courteously and asked him to write some recommendations...

...up—in some ways enormously better, in other ways, worse...

...First, Hong Kong comes closest to what a Friedmanite society might look like...

...While there he44 It is precisely the market's champions who are at pains to emphasize man's capabilities...

...When he [Friedman] heard about [what we were doing in Hong Kong]," says Cowperthwaite, "he sat in front of me almost rubbing his hands in glee...

...That was it...

...Friedman and the "Chicago Boys," after all, were Pinochet supporters...

...Instead they were left to be run by a Scots finance minister named John Cowperthwaite, whom Friedman concedes probably comes closer to his ideal than even Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher (if only because his power was more concentrated...

...In Fried-man's own words, "To put it in a nutshell, [the premise of positive economics] was that the ultimate test of the validity of a theory is not conformity to the canons of formal logic but the ability to deduce facts that have not yet been observed, that are capable of being contradicted by observation, and that subsequent observation does not contradict...

...But to those of us who have known it as home, the Friedman shadow looms large here, for two reasons...

...In retrospect it seems natural that Friedman and Hong Kong were destined to find one another...

...How can this be, if most of Ali's professional fights ended in knockouts or TKO's...

...The two discussed a number of other issues, which Friedman recounts...

...He can't help calling the young man's doggerel "poetry," and quoting it at length...

...She alludes to burn-out but quickly establishes herself as an elder stateswoman in the making, teaching at Princeton, serving as president of the Association of American Publishers, and thinktanking at the Institute for a Civil Society...

...In the racially charged moment when he claimed to have chucked his gold medal into the Ohio River, he became the face of militant black youth...

...It is 1962 and Muhammad Ali is still Cassius Clay, an Olympic gold-medalist with striking good looks and a strikingly big mouth, and even Liebling falls under the fighter's spell to some degree...

...the pieces here differ on the exact wording...

...members' side, the Vernon Jordan side, reserved for those who get paid huge sums for being listed on the left-hand side of letters...

...The financial secretary replied, as I recall, "Better they shouldn't...

...It proved to be a vintage performance...

...In terms of their professional work, Hong Kong has played only a minor part...

...What he doesn't tell you is a little flourish that Cowperthwaite revealed to me over a lunch I had with him some four decades after that fateful encounter...

...By the time he recaptured the heavyweight championship in 1974 he was the epitome of the survivor's perseverance and a worldwide symbol of black pride...

...Common practice for most scholars, but the seminars were presented to the public as Milton Friedman's masterminding the Chilean economy from his office in Chicago and—worse—endorsing the idea that only an authoritarian regime could make capitalism work...

...I wonder if this is what Deng Xiaoping had in mind when he overthrew decades of Maoism with the phrase, "Seeking truth from facts...

...Naturally Friedman never said any such thing, but what most annoyed him, he says, "was the pusillanimity of so many academics...who for the most part waffled...

...The occasion was the Friedmans' second trip to China, and though I'd followed the couple's writings since my undergraduate days I'd never before seen the great man in the flesh...

...It is an optimism that resonates throughout our political sector, what distinguishes Ronald Reagan's "morning in America" from Jimmy Carter's "malaise" or Pat Buchanan's "trench...

...Indeed, among the most notable features of these pieces is how seldom they focus on Ali's one inarguable claim to greatness: his astonishing skill and cunning in the ring...

...Emma Lazarus in the poem etched on the pedestal The American Spectator September 1998 75 of the Statue of Liberty...

...On the whole they seem more comfortable discussing tangible problems for which there are definitive answers—such as devising a more effective anti-aircraft shell for the Navy during Milton's time in Washington—than focusing on first principles, social or moral...

...In Two Lucky People, their aptly named memoirs, Milton and Rose Friedman cover an extraordinary amount of ground, from Rose's birth in what is now Ukraine and Milton's undergraduate days at Rutgers to the early years at the Treasury, the Chilean controversy and the Chicago school, and Milton's winning of the 1976 Nobel Prize...

...Toward the end, this understanding of man's potential leads them to the closest they come to introspection...

...The world at the end of our life is very different from the world in which we grew The Muhammad Ali Reader Edited by Gerald Early Ecco Press /30o pages $26 More Than a Champion: The Style of Muhammad Ali Jan Philipp Reemtsma Knopf / 172 pages /$23 REVIEWED BY John Lilly W ith a gold-medal victory for the United States at the 1960 Rome Olympics, Muhammad Ali assumed the protean symbolic aura that would stick with him for the rest of his life...

...I told Mr...

...So concludes this assessment of Declining and Falling Made Easy...

...A glance at the table of contents of The Muhammad Ali Reader reveals a list of over two dozen authors—including such virtuoso mythmakers as Norman Mailer, George Plimpton, and Murray Kempton — most of whom dwell in one way or another on Ali as celebrity and as symbol...

...A few years later, having made his first trip to China, Friedman characteristically wrote a letter to the Stanford Daily (he was then at the Hoover Institution), "out of sheer deviltry," noting that he'd just returned from Peking, that he'd given the same advice as he had in Chile, and asking whether he should then expect the same protests as were directed at him after his return from Chile...

...While he preferred slipping punches early in a fight (or, later in his career, covering up and taking them round after round in his patented "Ropea-Dope" defense), his evasiveness was only a prelude to the terrible firepower he brought to bear on exhausted opponents in the later rounds...

...Second, and doubtless for the same reason, when he writes about Hong Kong, it is as close as Friedman gets to a public display of affection...

...To a non-economist such as myself, the main contributions appear to boil down to two: First, that we should be able to predict what happens in economics...

...As Joyce Carol Oates points out, "the New York Times, among other censorious white publications, would not honor" his decision to take a Muslim name through the 1960's...

...Perhaps it is sheer nostalgia, but we recall our youth as a period when there was far less concern for personal safety and safety of property...

...It sounds so sensible today...

...If there is an idea that emerges from this book, it is ofAmerica and its potential...

...By 1964, when he defeated Sonny Liston to win the heavyweight crown, Clay was becoming Muhammad Ali, and being scorned in the press for his religious conversion to Elijah Muhammad's Nation of Islam...

...Liebling's article "Poet and Pedagogue," reprinted here, is a rare exception: a straightforward account of the man as a boxer, preparing for a bout at the start of his professional career...

...Lots of them, each with Schroeder's name on the left-hand side —the board Two Lucky People: Memoirs Milton and Rose D. Friedman University of Chicago Press 66o pages $35 REVIEWED BY William McGurn I t was a bearish Milton Friedman who greeted Hong Kong from the Conrad Hotel in 1993...

...The former I take to be a rough definition of "positive economics," while the latter represents the genesis of the ugly term "monetarism...

...Gordon Parks's profile (very prematurely entitled "The Redemption of the Champion"—the next year Ali would be stripped of his title and banned from his sport) shows Ali at his most vulnerable, baffled by the firestorm of press criticism and a nearly universal urge to attach a larger meaning to his every move...

...He immediately replied with the answer that I had myself reached...

...Such was Cowperthwaite's conviction that he would not allow the government even to keep GDP figures,lest they be used to justify a case for intervention...

...They would mess it up...

...And I wonder who was the more revolutionary in advancing the claim...

...Later Friedman did...

...For even when Mother England took a wrong turn after the war, the yellow people of Hong Kong were fortunately not thought worthy of socialism...

...In late 1972, Friedman did go to Santiago for six days, but not as an adviser to Pinochet...

...After a few questions from the floor, the press conference concluded and then came something I'd never seen in two decades of reporting from three continents: The entire Hong Kong press corps WILLIAM MCGURN is a member of the Wall Street Journal's editorial board...