At the End of the Day

...Now they want to hold back a bit because communities are running into budgetary and other problems in their attempts to comply...

...The legislature passed the act a while back to promote both racial balance in the public schools and its own self-image as a progressive body of lawmakers...

...Yet he was an extraordinary man--ruthless, but generous...

...in other words, "the larger part of school-to-school variation in achievement appears not to be a consequence of effects of school variation at all, but of variations in family backgrounds of the entering student bodies...

...who presided over the final liquidation of the British Empire...

...Macleod and Powell refused their services, and many like-minded Tories their allegiance, because they believed that Macmillan had maneuvered the Home succession, which was thought to be the culminating move in a deep plot of his, running for many years, to deny the succession to R.A...

...The Governor, you see, considers himself a "creative Republican" (just like Senator Brooke of the same state), and he feels this is a good issue on which to demonstrate how much more enlightened he is than normal, dull, uncreative Republicans...

...If one judges equality by measuring the performance of minority students, the available data indicate that the racial composition of the school one attends makes very little difference...

...Personally, I suspect this particular phrase is popular in liberal circles precisely because of those implications...

...it is merely hidden from the society that betrayed him by cheapening the values we all live by and robbing him of meaning beyond what we can glean from these pathetic scribblings about his hopes, his fears, and his need for future renown, aspects of the human being we all share with him as we share the shame that produced him...

...In the former, Louise Day Hicks is preparing for yet another session with the Boston electorate...

...During his period of office the terrible economic problems which beset the country today first gained a tight grip on the nation's throat...

...What is the major argument for busing...

...He made a herculean effort to shake off Britain's past: when Hugh Gaitskell, leader of the pretty nouveau arriviste Labour Party attacked the decision to enter Europe as a betrayal of a thousand years of history, Macmillan replied, "For them a thousand years of history--for us, the future," a remark that was astonishing from the leader of the history-drenched Tory Party...

...visionary, but old-fashioned...

...However, partly since they are in large part made up of a contemporary diary, they are extremely valuable for what they tell us about Harold Macmillan, the magician of modern British politics, a man who, when he came to the leadership after the Suez debacle, restored his party almost by sleight of hand, and led it to an election triumph in 1959...

...Integration is important if our multi-racial society is to become truly one nation, and the schools provide an excellent place to develop that kind of cohesiveness...

...Macmillan denies that he intrigued for Home and argues--in my view with a great deal of justification--that the fourteenth Earl was the favored choice of a great majority of the parliamentary party: certainly, Home would have been, after his triumph at the party conference of October 1963, the choice of the party in the country, whose darling he still is...

...rather that, under that fanciful signature, Arthur Bremer himself wrote the introduction to this volume in his most subtle effort to exonerate himself while passing off the blame for his crime on American society as a whole and Richard Nixon, ex officio...

...His patriotism, his nationalism, his conservatism, dance before the eyes: he was a conservative by attitude, not from principles...

...For busing has become one of the most important tests American liberals apply in their continuing efforts to separate the good guys from the bad guys...

...In personal style, in temperament, in feeling, he was the last British leader (except Home--but he led only briefly) who was bred and formed in the great days of Britain...

...Thus, for the historian of detail, there is very little in these memoirs...

...I can see it in McGovern...

...And it is a chronicle...

...and he left the leadership of the Party the following year...

...Since it was Macmillan he rang with this rather angry view, there can be little doubt about who his sponsor was: but Macmillan has nothing to say...

...It will take at least fifty years to assess him...

...Macmillan was a man of yesterday and the day after tomorrow...

...District Judge for the Southern District of Indiana, has handed down a ruling specifying just how much cross-district busing of how many public school pupils will make the racial composition of the different units of the Indianapolis Public School System consistent with Judge Dillin's vision of the requirements of the U.S...

...In Atlanta, the local chapter of the NAACP is being threatened with revocation of its charter for supporting a compromise school integration plan, again involving the busing of elementary school children, which the Association's national leadership feels does not go far enough in promoting the black/white pupil ratio which would be morally, socially, and constitutionally valid for Atlanta classrooms...

...stuff, this collective breast-beating...

...Duggan Andrd Malraux once said of General de Gaulle that he was "the man of the day before yesterday and the man of the day after tomorrow," meaning by this that the General drew his inspiration from a past often remote and cast his vision forward to a future equally distant...

...It is a curious feature This fall, a number of American cities are witnessing, once again, local variations on an increasingly familiar political theme...

...He kept the show he found on the road, and he healed and patched here and there as Nemesis crept up behind him...

...but if the reader will pardon another lapse of professional modesty, I would submit that, if "Lemay's" introduction had been entered as evidence in the Maryland trial, Bremer would be resting comfortably today in a psychiatric ward, non compos mentis...

...For example, readers in Britain avidly awaited two volumes in particular of the series--the one dealing with the Suez operation, and the present one, because it might be expected to give Macmillan's version of the strange sequence of events which led to the emergence of the Earl of Home as Prime Minister of Britain in 1963 (he was not elected, but chosen by the Establishment after a still uncertain amount of consultation with the Party's members of parliament), when illness forced Macmillan himself to lay down his burden...

...This means that most of the variation in achievement could not possibly be accounted for by school differences, since most of it lies within the school" (emphasis added...

...Such is the finding of the Coleman Report, the product of a two-year study of the nation's educational system, authorized by the Civil Rights Act of 1964...

...I thought I was coming as a healer," he said...

...In addition, like Macmillan, de Gaulle was a brilliant tactician of today: either man was more than capable of outmaneuvering, in the quotidian intrigues of politics, almost any rival or combination of rivals...

...The sophisticated among you have probably already figured out that the common theme in these little stories involves the busing of public school pupils to achieve what most of the nation's communications media innocently call "racial balance...

...he lost, though only narrowly, by Harold Macmillan Macmillan s Harper & Row will publish in January the general election of 1964...

...And who decides who is a failure...

...To be against busing is (like so many other things) a sign of one's insensitivity and/or racism, be it of the blatant or latent variety...

...His own place in history Macmillan sought to define by large brushstrokes: he wanted nothing less than to alter radically the history of his country, and even change its nature...

...By The Alternative December 1973 19...

...It goes without saying that if "Lemay's" assertion of President Nixon's complicity in the Wallace shooting were aired in open court, even America's conscience, Senator Weicker, would guffaw...

...Unfortunately, this whole argument rests on the assumption that differences between the races are totally the product of misunderstanding and discrimination--and this is manifestly not the case...

...As Edward Banfie!d p~ints out in The Unheavenly City, the major differences between the raccs are cultural ones--the most crucial distinction being that inner city blacks tend to be radically presentoriented, as opposed to their future-oriented, gratification-delaying, middle-class white brethren...

...J.P...

...A final irony is that the greatest success in Bremer's life has been the publication of this chronicle of failure...

...Two ministers--the late Iain Macleod and Enoch Powell--refused to serve Home...

...Lemay" pontificates: "So perhaps Bremer is, as he feared, 'just another god Damn failure.' If anyone can be a failure at twenty-two...

...Now, although he always relished that capacity of his--few politicians have enjoyed the game more than did Macmillan: he practically invented his Edwardian personality as a move in that game--Macmillan also looked to the distant future...

...A penny for your thoughts, Arthur...

...A proponent will almost certainly tell you that busing is necessary to promote ~'equal" education...

...His last entry, recorded two days before the Wallace shooting, declares quizzically, "My cry upon firing will be, 'A penny for your thoughts.' " Mr...

...he does point out, however, that such differences are linked with race, and furthermore, that they are serious differences...

...He ran the 18 The Alternative December 1973 economy, more or less: he never made strategic decisions about it...

...Actually, of course, the phrase is not innocent at all--everyone knows that '%alance" is a good idea, and that "imbalance" implies that something is wrong...

...Bremer was promptly clapped in jail for his near-deadly attack on Governor Wallace, but not before the bloodhounds from Harper's caught a whiff of his heady account of sensational crime (many a stomach churns at the recollection of the Harper's cover feature a couple years back, "Manson Wins--A Fantasy...

...This argument runs roughly as follows: "Look, if we just get black kids and white kids together at an early enough age, they'll learn that they aren't that different, really, and they'll get along and become friends...

...In the school contest, almost all the candidates are going out of their way to express their deep concern for the children of Boston and their fervent belief that busing is bad...

...But nowhere is there any account of how Alec Home came to be a candidate for the leadership: he did not put himself forward--he was quite unambitious...

...A colleague has told me that Macmillan considers the chronicle of his life, which closes with this volume, to be aimed, not at those reading it now, not even at the students of a next generation--but further on, perhaps fifty or a hundred or more years ahead...

...Snatched by a fit of mock-remorse, Bremer observes: "The whole country's going liberal...

...But he knew those days were past...

...It may seem a trifle wild, but this reviewer wouiu like to put forward the theory that Harding Lemay does not exist...

...Heavy...

...It is exceedingly difficult, howfraudulent in many ways, but with a streak of nobility...

...a man who first tried to get Britain into the EEC...

...Hicks do well because the number of such "wrongheaded" people seems to be rather great...

...Need I banter with the reader's intelligence any longer...

...I submit that the reason for this is that whatever else one may think of Louise Day Hicks, on this one she and her supporters are exactly right...

...For some reason, however, a number of Americans are violently opposed to busing despite such arguments, and seem quite willing to live with the opprobrium that attaches to such "wrongheadedness...

...Though a competent domestic Prime Minister, he was no more than that...

...and there is evidence to suggest that when he discovered how much opposition his candidacy would meet, he felt betrayed...

...probably do so again...

...Sargent doesn't want to let them do it...

...Hicks has little to offer in these encounters beyond her maiden name (a famous one in these parts) and her vehement opposition to busing...

...many people like them so much that they feel the whole solution to racial problems must lie somewhere along these lines...

...The proponent of busing will probably reply that even if forced integration does not yield substantial improvement in the performance of minority school children, it should be pursued anyway as a "social good...

...and whose government came to its end in the aftermath of sordid scandal and the breakdown of his own health...

...Banfield does not argue that such differences are caused by race...

...And he has sixty-two more years in which to collect his prison memoirs...

...With renewed enthusiasm, he stalks Wallace across Michigan and Maryland...

...Meanwhile, the municipality itself cranks up for city council and school beard elections...

...You know, my biggest failure may well be when I kill Wallace...

...Thus, much was neglected...

...In Boston, the action proceeds apace in several arenas...

...This is true even of the young lady who is the candidate of the "Communist Progressive Labor Party" --(although it is possible that PL opposes busing because they feel that forced integration will, in some way, delay the capital-R Revolution...

...In addition, says the Report, most differences in performance show up from the moment of entry into the school system...

...P a t r i c k Cosgrave ever, to figure out how forcing every school in a given system to have certain percentages of black and white pupils yields more "equal" education...

...On Beacon Hill, the state legislature is deciding whether to override Governor Francis Sargent's veto of a bill which sought to suspend for a year the requirements of the state's Racial Imbalance Act...

...He exerted himself, by the grandiosity of his style, to conceal that fact from his fellow-countrymen, partly in order to assuage their hurt, partly in order to lead them deviously into a new future, that of the EEC, in which enterprise, though he failed, his lieutenant and ultimate successor Edward Heath has at least temporarily succeeded...

...The Macmillan memoirs have almost nothing of revelation, or indiscretion, nor even very much of special pleading about them...

...And, where he wanted to be, he was a man of extraordinary imagination, however much one might detest the direction the imagination took...

...In Indianapolis, the Honorable S. Hugh Dillin, U.S...

...These ideas have a lot of sentimental appeal...

...Butler, his deputy Prime Minister, and guru of the young Tories of the postwar generation...

...Constitution...

...After conducting extensive and complicated tests that separated and analyzed the different factors affecting performance in schools, the Report noted that "School-to-school variations in achievement, from whatever s o u r c e . . . are much smaller than individual variations within the school, at all grade levels, for all racial and ethnic groups...

...Indeed, politicians like Mrs...

...as his memory gathers dust in the Maryland State Penitentiary, Bremer is chalking up royalties on this copyrighted work...

...To be for busing indicates that one is "sensitive to the plight of American blacks," and is concerned with "ending discrimination in the nation's school systems...

...Hicks usually does quite well, and will of his career that a man bent on such ultimately radical change in the historical direction of his country was so content with the mushy amalgam of attitudes, policies, and complacencies which his country and his party accepted under his rule...

...During the recent days of unprecedented bombings in Southeast Asia, I find it hard to believe anyone's life can match the failure of Richard Nixon's . . . . [Bremer's] life is not over, as he hoped it would be...