The Great American Saloon Series
Coyne, John R. Jr.
defense output and]or advertising expenditures. The remaining forty finns were choson randomly. Measurements were made for each firm to determine the degree to which it was...
...The most important thing wasn't the bars themselves, but how you felt in them...
...The beer was still a dime a glass and there was a steam table with greasy dishes like fat barbecued short ribs that would last you for a day and a half: Sol, the semiobese owner, a refugee from somewhere east of Vienna ("Mees-tair Coyen...
...country/western bars filled with expatriates from the southwest...
...But it's different now and there isn't as much time...
...Greater advertising expenditures or larger firm size were associated with lower values of the index measuring the degree to which profits were traded off for sales growth...
...One summer afternoon Markel and I drove to the river, climbed across the bridge and down a rope into the town (the rope was the quickest way down), and stopped at a small bar for a couple of beers...
...There was always a Lady Brett, usually a junior league dropout or a disenchanted young wife with a nice little trust fund, sufficient to pay for the booze...
...The model for the lifestyle, however, was Hemingway, especially the Sun-Also-Rises Hemingway...
...These stocks over the period 1949-1964 offered to investors about 21 percent more risk, measured by fluctuations in year-to-year rates of return to shareholders, than didrandomly selected portfolios of thirteen stocks per portfolio...
...The talk was flip, quick, slightly nasty, but never touching on things like your sex life, your family, God, how you felt, or how you related...
...Secondly, only those sixty-seven firms earning positive profits were used...
...And things should always be just about perfect at the halfway point--you've just left a good flight with pretty, happy stewardesses, stiff drinks, and that completely easy feeling that comes perhaps only on a long flight---you're in the damned thing, everything has been ripped out of your hands, you're not responsible for a damned thing, and you taste the booze and you taste your cigarettes, and things you haven't thought about for years---the good happy thing~ ~come rushing back...
...fly-infested bars in Manhattan where old boozers with shaking hands always manage to get that first brimming morning shot up to their mouths for a quick slurp without spilling a drop...
...But that brash young loud mouth who used to babble on Sunday afternoons in the Polaris I_~unge in Fairbanks now embarrasses me just a bit, and I think the influence of that coed with the big brown eyes--who, I've begun to suspect, is a little bit smarter, a bit mere talented, and a hell of a lot nicer than her h u s ~ y yet civilize me before rm a candidate for the gout...
...But even then I guess I realized I had asked for it...
...But that's the way many people who thought of themselves as literary types in the fifties acted...
...In particular, it is essential that we discover how and why the United States came to concede nmnerical superiority to the USSR in the principal instruments of modern w a r . John Newhouse's Co/d Dawrr The Story of SALT*is clearly the best place to begin an inquiry into the diplomatic process which begat the Moscow accords...
...This was the last great period of what we call contemporary Americanliterature...
...beer bars with plank floors and drunken truck drivers and boys from the alfalfa plant romancing nearsighted waitresses from the local diner with Earnest Tubb and Webb Pierce and Kitty Wells on the juke box...
...These negative results confirm other testing of Galbraith's views that I presented at the 1969 meetings of the American Economic Association...
...Most of those tabs were eventually paid...
...Kissinger himself released top-secret data to Newhouse, including transcripts of cables relaying instructions from Washington to the American negotiating team...
...the "definitive" account of the SALT negotiations, an assertion which is empirically difficult to challenge inasmuch as it remains up to now the only account...
...But we learn to live for the pauses, during which we stretch time out so that the possibilities that seemed so real in so many taverns a few years ago seem as real as ever...
...Beyond that, Newhouse's volume is a history of An~rican strategic thinking over the last decade, tracing U.S.-Soviet military relations--and the origin of the strategic arms negotiations--from the early sixties to the present, with often perceptive insights into the views on American nuclear strategy which wore held by principal figures during that period...
...You're right in the middle...
...For the general reader it may serve as an introduction to the revived debate over the proper nuclear strategy for the United States, written by an articulate proponent of one school of thought in that debate...
...Other bars---a small place in "Spanish Harlem where one night a gentleman from the Dominican Republic, a Cuban, ap.d a Puerto Rican and I sang Irish songs and Christmas carols while a go-go girl from the west coast of Puerto Rico danced to our music...
...Drinking is a way of life in Fairbanks...
...bars with free popcorn or cheese or sardines to go with the beer or hot hors d'oeuvres to go with the martinis...
...I was big stuff from New York, and them was just no chance of any kind of permanent union in A/aska...
...Also old-timers, construction workers, surveyors, hunters and trappers, and bush pilots...
...Joe's place in Iowa City where every Wednesday night a friend, new a theologian and long-time member of the peace movement, met to drink huge twenty-five cent draft beers, eat Polish sausages, and watch the fights fit was also in Joe's place that I watched television coverage of JFK's assassination, having just fled from a Victorian seminar in which the professor, hearing halfway through class of the assassination, had insisted on reading Tennyson's '~ears, Silent Tears," while tears of his own trickled down his cheeks...
...Then the good ones: Tommy's Elbow Room, where there's a mix of clientele like no place I know in the rest ~f the United States--college professors, students, aging Beats who commuted from Mexico to San Francisco to Fairbanks, lawyers, an Alaska supreme court justice, airline stewardesses from Wein, Alaska Airlines, and Pan Am...
...The Algonquin, where I signed the contract for my first book, and where I had to borrow a tie from the barter~ter...
...For some elaborate reason, the rationale for which escapes me now--and I'm glad it does.~his bar was also one to which I took girls in whom I'd'developed a sudden interest...
...He hit the spike on the side, so the story goes, and it flew over the railing in a high arch and splashed into the Tanana...
...She'd grown up on a homestead in Alaska learning about things like reading aloud from Dickens at Christmas and oranges as the finest treat in the Christmas stockings...
...First, all seventy firms in the sample were used...
...Recently, I spent a few hours in the bar in the airport at Albany, New York...
...He appears to reject the oversimplified "acti0n-reaction" theory of the arms race, so beloved by Mr...
...You gettink skinny...
...When I arrived at Columbia at the age of sixteen, prepared for life'in the big city by a careful study of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, the place to hang out in uptown Manhattan was the West End Tavern...
...IN HIS PERCu;I~rlVE analysis of the impact of the 1972 strategic arms agreements upon the global military balance, the British scholar John Erickson observed that "mere than one Soviet strategist and military planner these days must be still rubbing his eyes in order to make sure that he is not, after all, dreaming...
...I remember places with greenish pickled eggs and Polish sausages in jars on the bar...
...If they refused, or if they said something I thought inane, or if they didn't like white rum and beer, then that was it...
...his account is replete with ~whodunit" motifs and other conceits mere appropriate to a writer of suspense fiction, and suffers as well from tedious overuse of theological metaphors...
...Not one of the indexes measuring technostructureorientation was significantly related to DIF in the direction of relationship suggested by...
...A sample of defense stocks was analyzed to see what evidence could be brought to bear on this claim...
...And after fourteen years of marriage and four kids I still have the family's big temperament...
...They're in temporary suspension and totally relaxed, for O'Hare is usually the halfway point for serious travelers...
...Measurements were made for each firm to determine the degree to which it was technootructure-oriented and these indexes were then compared to values of DIF...
...The talk, for most o f us, was primarily about literature...
...If you talked about those things, or if you lost your temper, or if you couldn't hold your own (dertain rare people, who for some unexplained reason were perceived as inherently "nice," were always exempted from this requirement), then you were told to shove off, and through unspoken agreement found yourself an outcast in the West End...
...They talk easily, with that special sort of subdued euphoria that characterizes people who travel frequently by air...
...McNarmra (and, as Newhouse reminds us, by Napoleon), even if he substitutes for it the equally ingenuous Kissinger view which holds that arms races stern from the '~inexorable march of technology...
...I didn't have my crucifix to pull out in return, over which we could have shed final farewell tears...
...I~ter, at a table in the same place, looking out at Telegraph, I wrote much of the first draft of my first book, flying all the way from New York (I couldn't afford it) for just that pmpc~ to sit at that table in that bar and write that book...
...None of these experiments yielded results consistent with the Galbraith-Baumol sales izmximiz~tion hypothesis...
...The sample contained thirteen of the top prime defense contractors for whom defense contracts accounted for over 30 percent of sales...
...Newhouse even concedes--unfortunately without elaboration or adequate analysis---4hat a condition of "rough parity" is not without its dangers for the West, and that in the wake of the concessions granted to the USSR at SALT I the United States has little leverage or The Alternative June-September 1974 17...
...Peeling off was always understood, either with a girl you didn't want to share or just to be alone...
...a Hof-Brau restaurant in Borkeley where I held my own waket"or Bobby Kennedy in 1968 by drinking_ Carlsberg from noon until midnight...
...The evidence that I have been able to uncover reveals that Galbraith's work possesses to a remarkable degree one of the essential attributes of successful scien~-_~ consistency...
...But at O'Hare you're in between, and for that brief moment you space things out, and once again there's plenty of time, time to do yourself over, time to do the things you know you were meant to do...
...Serious students have been repelled by the novelized style into which Newhouse frequently lapses, especially when chronicling the progress toward agreement in late 1971 and early 1972...
...I don't spend as much time in bars these days, and when I do it's usually at the National Press Club talking to one of Washington's finest raconteurs, Sugar 16 The Alternative June-September 1974 Mike Dean, who knew Trujillo, Batista, and LBJ and all the good guys, and watching John Prokoff, the world's greatest Lithuanian bartender, mix drinks...
...No one bothered you, and the bartender always bought every third beer...
...These ex3~riments offered twenty-four chances for confirmatory evidence, and a few such confirmations could have been expected to arise by pure chance...
...You always get the dialogue you deserve...
...I'd go there by myself about once a week to write a short story and drink beer at a table in a small alcove...
...But she'd let me babble, lean against me so she wouldn't lurch, and I never suspected...
...For example, I there reported a test of Galbraith's belief that: "Risks that would otherwise be unacceptable can be assumed in the civilian econ only if they are protected by the much mere nearly riskless weapons economy . . . . These advantages of the weapons competition to the industrial system could not easily be sacrificed by the industrial system" (The New Industrial State, p. 339...
...indeed, the unremitting Soviet milif~ry buildup over the past eighteen months has given rise in some quarters to fears that the Soviets may attain useable military predominance over the West by 1980...
...On Sundays we'd go to the Polaris and sit at a small table near the piano where I could watch the lighted Schlitz globe spin and we'd talk for hours--or mere accurately I'd talk for hours about the big city and what a hell of a guy I was and those great books waiting to be written...
...Finally, Co/d Dawn is a highly dramatized account of the SALT negotiations thenmelves, coupled with an obviou~ Mthough seldom directly statei--defense of the results...
...Like so many other of Harding's ventures, this one proved a fluke...
...A total mix, the conversation about politics or Jane Austen or hunting--a big fireplace at one end, especially comforting on those days toward the end of December when the temperature drops toward minus sixty and people wander in and out breathing ice fog and stand before the fire and take a special sort of pride in the weather...
...Not surprisingly, these allegations have been denied by the secretary, and other reports suggest that Raymond Garthoff of the State Department, formerly senior advisor to the American delegation, was Newhouse's primary source of "closely held" information...
...Along the Road Is my father in the barroom...
...The best one is the large upstairs lounge at O'Hare, where the drinks are very good, surprisingly cheap, and the bartenders, cut in the Daley mold, unusually friendly...
...piano bars just before the Liberace and the Ebb Tide school, when every good barroom pianist sounded like Eddy Duchin or Fats Waller...
...Ten years ago, in the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis, the prospect of permanent strategic inferiority must have appeared depressingly real to the SoVIets...
...It was a neighborhood bar--odd-jobs people, old-timers, pensioners from the area--and never too full...
...Since the firms in the sample varied in the values of the indexes of technootructure-orientation, it was possible to ascertain whether larger tradeoffs of profits for sales growth were associated with greater technostructure-orientation...
...today, mirabile dictu, after the lapse of a single decade the USSR is "not only guaranteed parity with the United States but also accorded the possibility of eventual superiority" (Erickson, "Soviet Military Power," Strateg/c Review, I [Spring, 1973, Special Supplement], p. ix...
...The only conclusion permitted by this investigation is that Galbraith's notions are remarkably consistent in their inability to find confirmation...
...measured people by some code of his own...
...To be sure, in one sense the former statement is true: Co/d Dawn is clearly an "insider's" account, based on leaks from one or mere of those now-proverbial "sources close to the negotiations...
...strip-show bars, dedicated to separating service men and construction workers from their paychecks...
...She listened beautifully, and it was much later that I came to realize that as a vivacious girl with a unique temperament, she had decided to control that temperament for me, the theory perhaps being even then that there was room for only one overtly flamboyant temperament per family...
...PERHAPS MIDDLE age is finally winning out...
...But none did...
...Across the river, before the Chena flooded it out, the International Bar, with a rinky-tink piano that my friend Bill Markel played while I sang, and the old-timers and the construction workers filled our beer mug on the bar with silver dollars...
...Thirdly, only those forty-one firms earning profit rates of 10 percent or more were included...
...indeed, there have been reports from other such "sources" that Mr...
...Apparently I had some sort of test in mind, for I made them all listen to the records, watched their reactions, then insisted that they drink white rum and beer...
...Later, of course, it ends, for the price you pay as a solitary air traveler is getting there...
...But then we'd gone for our records and our drinks for about the third time and the conversation was getting intimate and--I suppose it was the rmn--she suddenly reached inside her blouse, pulled out a little medallion, and said: '~Phere's something between us that we can never .overcome...
...Though such views may be considered excessively pessimistic, few would todag assert that the United States emerged triumphant from the HelsinkiVienna bargaining;, it is thus imperative that we extract the relevant lessons from SALT I and apply them to current and future negotiations with the Soviet Union...
...It wasn't much of place, but it reminded me of other airport bars in which I'd waited for someone or something...
...Nearly all commentators on SALT who do not belong to the assured destruction school of nuclear strategy have rendered similar judgments...
...And, of course, we were all writing stories and novels...
...In the process, he makes several points worth p:oting...
...He writes knowledgeably concerning certain aspects of the American negotiating style, calling particular attention to our difficul, ty in maintaining requisite firmness and consistency when bargaining with the Soviets...
...The bars are always full--Indian and Eskimo bars where bewildered kids from" the bush villages kill thenmelves as rapidly as possible with booze, the girls trading themselves f o r a few Grain Bolts to GIs who prowl the bars on paydays (and now, of course, there are the oil men...
...I knew then that I would never have a family...
...There are good ones, however...
...Airport bars are generally lousy--especially those in New York and Washington--plastickyfurnishings, overpriced stingy drinks, indifferent bartenders...
...She was easily the prettiest girl on the Alaska Campus, and we blended beautifully, but th@re was never a chance of anything serious coming out of it...
...McSorley's in Manhattan, with a headwaiter named John Coyne, during the days when a pack of hairy suffragettes liberated it...
...Attention is also drawn to the time constraints placed upon the American SALT delegation by the President's insistence that an agreement be ready for signing at the Moscow Summit...
...Co/z/ Dawn is several books in one...
...One bar, just down from the West End a few blocks on the other side of Broadway was called, I believe, The Gay White Way--you could still use the word gay quite innocently in the fifties...
...People drink desperately in the winter when the temperatures average in the minus thirties and t h e sun never comes up...
...Callow...
...I4zemingway and Fitzgerald and Faulkner were taken very seriously, and moot people modeled their prose on them...
...It's a hell of a town to be a Mormon in...
...And the Polaris "I~unge, ,with a quiet piano, where I used to take a University of Alaska coed with huge brown eyes...
...Every now and then, however, there's a sharp flash of memory--usually during~ a trip--and I remember what it used to be like...
...Or perhaps I'm finally becoming domesticated-my wife is pleased that after fourteen years of marriage I no longer call our bathroom the men's room...
...Thus, the uninitiated will discover the logic of deterrence, basic strategic concepts such as counterforce and countervalue, and such superficially arcane acronyms as MIRV, NCA, BMD, ABM, and MAD, all explained with reasonable clarity and occasionally with wit...
...All of this seems designed to persuade the reader that he is being allowed a brief look into a very secret world, whose mysteries he cannot fathom and whose decisions he must not presun~ to challenge...
...e White Rose, a fly-spattered Manhattan refuge with daily specials--Shot of Carstairs with Short Beer Chaser, thirty-five cents--where my friend and editor ]_~w Rockwell and I ate corned beef sandwiches and drank McSorley's ale --twenty-five cents a mug--~old to the White Rose on special cousignment---and where I signed the contract for my second book---or, perhaps mere accurately, my first nonbook...
...But whatever the reason, I spend much less time in bars than I used to...
...Columbus had a great deal more corroboration for his belief that he had found the Indies that Galbraith has for his discovery of the new industrial state...
...And when the place is right and the drinks are right and the talk is right, there's just as much time as there used to be...
...Galbraith...
...A good big window looked out on Broadway and there was a juke box with old big-band records that had probably been there for The Alternative June-September 1974 15 thirty years--Helen O'Connell and Bob Eberle on "Green Eyes and Amapola," Bunny Borigan on "Can't Get Started" ("I've been consulted by Franklin D./Greta Garbo has asked me to tea . . '."), Fats Waller singing and playing with that marvelous left hand "Ain't Misbehavin"-surely one of the world's greatest records-and something wonderful with Artie Shaw --slushy, sugary forties dance-band standard arrangement, then about halfway through that clarinet just cutting in, clear and cold and pure, slicing the slush--.-one of" those mements...
...Trader Vic's in San Francisco, to which I was summoned from marned student housing in Borkeley to have dinner with Bill Buckley, and where over big brown rum drinks I accepted a job at National Review...
...Of particular interest is his analysis of Robert McNanmra, who set the SALT talks in motion, he argues, to head off .public pressure for deployment of a broad-coverage ballisticmissile defense system...
...A few other special places: Martin's Draft Bar in Hillsdale, Michigan, where the rest rooms are labeled "Bucks" and 'T)oes," where the draft beer tastes like Coors, where you can buy a F~i~pucker, where I spent a wonderful week in a booth by the window and rediscovered things I thought I'd never remember...
...His menograph has been acclaimed, in fact, as *New York: Holt, Rhinehart and Winston, 1973, $7.95...
...Then there was Alaska...
...Only advertising expenditures and firm size turned out to be significantly related to DIF in some of these experiments but the direction of this relationship was the opposite of that which is required to provide confirmatory evidence of Galbraith's ideas...
...No, the barroom's in your father...
...O'Hare is the crossroads, and the people at the bar come from'Hartford, Dallas, Phoenix, Anchorage...
...And for a moment or two, it's nice to think so...
...Out on the Nenana Highway,lthe Malemute Saloon, where the proprietor read Robert Service and served moose and caribou steaks, And then out to Nenana itself, a town that could be reached in the surnnmr by crossing a high railroad bridge in which Warren Harding himself had set the golden spike...
...But she listened well and drank well...
...Three statistical experiments in search of such a relationship were made with these data...
...Later, in the sixties, it became increasingly difficult to communicate with the new breed, for they couldn't understand--no doubt with good reason--that this was a sty/e, and that in fact it was possible through this style to express great friendship and affection...
...It was absolutely the last thing I wanted...
...That all ended, if I remember correctly, when a little blonde Barnard student, whom I'd picked up in.the West End one afternoon as she brushed around the corner of the bar, passed all the first test with flying colors...
...In what we call the real world, framed in the minutes of our daily lives, real time does grow shorter...
...And equally important, there was always a hell of a lot of time...
...You're in between flights, and the best part is still ahead...
...That's how it is at O'Hare...
...The clientele was mixed---pensioners from the neighborhood, off-duty cops cruising for college girls, jocks who had briefly jumped the reservation, and literary types like Kerouac...
...The medallion was a gold star of David...
...After our marriage I learned that she left the Polaris after each session bombed...
...Consistency, however, is not enough...
...In any event, Newhouse does provide us with an absorbing--if clearly partial and incomplete glimpse into the development of the American negotiating positions and the manner in which concord with the Soviets was finally achieved...
...The drinkers at the bar--the good ones--have learned how very important it is to parcel out time, and they appreciate the central beauty of air travel...
...As I inspected my rope burns, the proprietor shook his head and said, -'~I just don't understand why the hell we don't get mere - tourists here...
...In the fifties, bars were our meeting pFaces, our living rooms, our studies...
...Since the Galbraith-Baumol sales maximization hypothesis requires that firms earn a minimum acceptable (to shareholders) profit rate before they tradeoff additional profits to gain additional sales, the third experiment would seem most relevant...
...And in the summer, when the sun never goes down, people drink all night to celebrate the sunlight...
...Trader Vic's in Washington, where Spiro Agnew took me for lunch after offering me a job on his staff, and where, again, we drank big ~brown rum drinks...
...If you passed, he let you run up a tab for as long as you wanted...
Vol. 7 • June 1974 • No. 9
