The Middle East: What Next?
Clark, Joseph & Edsall, Thomas B. & Howard, Dick & Fein, Leonard
There is something unseemly about the invariably gloomy analyses of the problems that now confront the Middle East, in the wake of the EgyptIsrael peace treaty. The treaty was in itself...
...She is sure about the forthcoming Kennedy candidacy for president, primarily because of the appearance of this book...
...Do you need a diploma...
...But these attempts to open the party often do serve to increase access to power and profit for an elite segment of the middle class...
...That strength, and the full sense of it, are needed to deal with what lies ahead...
...The idea of relevance lent itself quickly to that of relativity...
...ALPHONSE, GASTON...
...To a lesser extent, the same process continues with the black community...
...Steady simplification of voter registration and prohibiting the poll tax worked to expand the franchise for the Democratic left constituency—blacks, poor, transient workers...
...But will we speak out also against inhuman slaughter in Indonesia, where over 100,000 alleged Communists have been not perpetrators, but victims...
...The assault from the right will certainly be escalated as we move toward the 1980 elections...
...These are benefits that cannot be taken away by the Speaker or anyone else, and they consequently serve to prevent the leadership from exercising significant control over the political future of the members...
...it represents an acknowledgment of the entitlement of the Palestinians...
...But, outside the elite universities, one wonders whether the Harvard plan makes (economic) sense...
...this position has produced for her $40,000 in contributions from interest groups directly under her committee's jurisdiction...
...Minorities require a system that bends, unfettered by rules, to provide benefits and to force some redistribution of economic resources, which would face almost certain defeat if put up to public referendum...
...Thus, at a time when Democrats control both the presidency and Congress, these measures have undermined the power of the Democratic party to formulate policy...
...The military can deal with both problems, since it is essentially antihierarchical, concerned not with excellence and the like, but with getting-the-job-done...
...The surface logic in its behalf is impeccable: public financing will prevent special interests from buying campaigns and weaken or eliminate the ability of a wealthy candidate to purchase his election...
...there is no serious debate within the PLO regarding the Israeli question...
...Decent people will have no difficulty making the choice, terribly sad though it be...
...At the same time, the creation of complex rules, both in setting up slates in primaries and in the organization of caucuses in "open" caucus states, means that delegates are no longer selected on the basis of vote-getting and 262 fund-raising ability but on the basis of verbal skills and legal aptitude...
...or, if you live on Long Island, you can take business courses offered on commuter trains...
...Elected only in 1974, Gladys Noon Spellman (D-Md...
...J. Edgar Hoover was demanding that there be no clemency for Scales as long as he refused to name names, and that Scales was not about to do...
...If the incident holds out a lesson for today it surely is that military firmness toward the Soviet Union can only be one side, and the less important side, of American policy...
...They will see it as a sham, an impotent and shameful compromise...
...The Freedom of Information Act is used far less by the press and public interest groups than by corporations seeking to discover information about competitors and regulation...
...This will, of course, be thought the exception that proves the rule, whatever that silly phrase means...
...He dramatized the challenge by charging that the Carter budget proposals were unfair to "the poor, the black, the sick, the young, the cities, and the unemployed...
...Moderates do not take credit for the ugliness the PLO substitutes for policy...
...A random voice, now and again, here or there, is not the same as a serious debate...
...and that in a country without a clear ideology, minorities must seek governmental protection in the form of special benefits...
...While sneering at Schlesinger's detailed history based on personal interviews, public papers, and the author's private diaries, in no instance does she challenge any of the facts or cite a single inaccuracy in this 915-page work...
...Finally, the business PACs have created a new source of campaign contributions for members of Congress that allow them to become increasingly independent of the leadership...
...In fact, however, it is questionable whether the injection of public funds at one point into the political process will eliminate the marketplace aspects of a political-economic system that is based on the marketplace...
...The press is inherently critical of politically inspired compromises of principle...
...There were, however, other aspects to this overthrow of tradition...
...Virtually every serious discussion of these matters in which I have participated over the course of the last several years concludes that one side must give the other side a "signal...
...The two social-economic units best equipped to form a PAC are the corporation and the trade association...
...The elevation of these men represents the institutionalization of power in the hands of chairmen who represent what has been the mainstream of the Democratic party...
...Perhaps if Carter gives signs of facing defeat Ted Kennedy might be prevailed upon to enter the race...
...He had condemned the invasion of Hungary...
...Yet, the Palestine question will not go away...
...Kennedy, again alone, denounced the Defense Department's action on the floor of the Senate...
...The usual answer points to their nihilism and cult of immediacy, suggesting that a better theoretical understanding would have changed their practical proposals...
...The history of the last 20 years, Kennedy said, had demonstrated "beyond doubt that our approach to revolutionary war must be political—political first, political last, political always...
...The stinginess of the autonomy plan makes it an entirely unacceptable game...
...The question is whether we, in this position of dominance, are going to have not the charity but the wisdom to stop penalizing our fellow citizens whose only fault or sin is that they were born...
...False predictions and great investments led to increased plant and faculty during the '60s, when the demographic curve had already begun to sink...
...And such a debate cannot take place in the context of a sustained American campaign to pressure Israel into concessions...
...To dream about utopia is one attitude...
...Advance at work...
...This, after 90 percent of the CP's membership had left the party and in some places dues were being maintained partly by FBI agents...
...But that is not a likely development, nor, even if it were to come to pass, would it represent anything more than a temporary palliative...
...not Roman history but that of blacks or women...
...The kind of national debate that must take place in Israel if a genuine reckoning with Palestinian claims is to be undertaken will simply not happen in the context of weekly terrorist attacks...
...but they are saying that billions are being wasted in the name of defense...
...The Democratic Conference and Democratic Agenda people who fought for national health insurance and other liberal positions at the Democratic party's Midterm conference in Memphis continued that tradition...
...Governor Brown would like to challenge Carter in the primaries...
...Public financing of elections is the classic example of the problems created by procedural reform...
...Only 15 years ago, conservative Southerners chaired 22 out of 35 House and Senate committees...
...this only showed, the Bureau replied, what a truly secret muckamuck he was...
...This vacuum has been partly filled by the middle class, with the substance of its politics a self-interested protectionism: legislative lids on the property tax...
...Attacks on patronage and favoritism are based on the belief that the political system should be based on merit...
...This Democratic constituency has been held together by the glue of favoritism, compromise, deals, rewards for the loyal, and penalties for those who fail to toe the line...
...None of these is beyond the reach of politics even in a time of Proposition 13...
...With the remaining committees held by Southerners, and the growing seniority of blacks, it would seem that power has been distributed in a manner closely paralleling the constituency of the Democratic party itself...
...Perhaps it relates to the stance that Kennedy sought to define for our country in opposing totalitarianism, especially in Asia, Africa, Latin America...
...The number of corporate PACs financing federal elections has grown from 89 in 1974 to 812 as of January 1979...
...Occupying your leisure time...
...The only thing that might make it go away is to acknowledge that, whatever the historic rights and wrongs of the matter, there needs to be a form of Palestinian selfrule on the West Bank...
...Without a new vigor on the left, doubtful at present, the 96th Congress is likely to turn further to the right...
...This is to be expected since another tradition holds sway, that the parties eschew ideological straitjackets...
...The functional, but not deliberate, alignment of the reform movement with the middle class and the decline in the political leverage of minorities suggest that the conservative turn of the 95th Congress is not merely transitory...
...no longer did one even need English composition, where one would have to show a capacity to write a grammatical sentence or even a few properly organized paragraphs...
...First, the story it presents of highlights in the 15 unusual years from 1953 to 1968...
...Again: qualities favoring the middle class over the working class...
...In the light of the PLO's behavior, that emphasis seems entirely reasonable to many Israelis...
...There is no question that it would split the Likud, and there is very little question that Mr...
...There are others who may rise to that need, including Carter and Kennedy, as the '70s come to an end...
...Whatever the legal status of the West Bank—and it seems to me quite plain that Israel's claim is not less compelling 259 than any competing claim—the matter we confront is essentially political rather than legal...
...For the net effect of their viciousness is to make Mr...
...The army too needs 18-yearolds...
...When delegates to the party convention were selected largely by state parties, coalition politics dominated a system in which victory goes to the politician who can put together a "majority of minorities...
...It is not the crazies of the right that will prevent it from happening...
...He avoided political indebtedness...
...It may have been a successful campaign strategy to avoid entanglement with "the Humphrey coalition," but this also sharply increased the likelihood of a rootless, aimless domestic presidency...
...But the PLO leadership represents the West Bank Palestinians today principally because there is no other game in town...
...The PACs provided an ideal organizing tool just at a time (1974-76) when business was preparing a massive effort to counter the election of a Democratic president...
...But what was really under consideration was large-scale escalation and the beginning of huge appropriations for war in Vietnam...
...They have tended to take the power and profits of the elective process away from party loyalists whose backgrounds approximated those of the voters themselves, and have turned them over to a middle-class elite...
...they wanted a university from which would come a continual and pelf-reflective critique of the capitalist society in wnich the university was anchored and which it could ignore only at its own peril...
...Most liberals were not arguing against NATO commitments and adequate defense in an unruly world, what with the Soviet Union showing its customary ability to fish in the muddy waters of the Middle East, Africa, and Southeast Asia...
...the coal miners of West Virginia...
...This assist to the ideological right was, in most cases, not the intended effect of reform...
...Just now, if things go well, the Israelis are about to learn that it is not the case that Arabs cannot be trusted...
...The kind of reform that has worked to benefit the poor is generally the simplification of the elective process: the exact opposite of the rulemaking drive of middle-class reformers...
...The reform of the '60s could be understood—and was—as a victory of the New Left...
...True price, interest and profit, and wage controls would seem the answer to inflation...
...it is a real problem, and it requires not "handling," but a real solution...
...In short, to the administrative mind it sounds like a good deal is being offered: the rhetoric is right, the funds are there, and hierarchy is only downpeddled, not eliminated...
...Scales was released for Christmas 1962 and Rauh described Kennedy's action: The act of granting clemency to Scales without his "cooperation" by "naming names" is a repudiation of the loyalty test long used by the FBI...
...Could—or should—they have done differently...
...Norman Thomas and Joseph Rauh organized a campaign for his release...
...The revolt of the '60s was the leaven that transformed an adaptation that might have been dealt with administratively and brought to a fullfledged crisis of values...
...Meeting glamorous people (or professors, politicians, or bureaucrats...
...I think Schlesinger's biography is an important and extremely informative book...
...But the generals were clamoring to bomb the missile sites in Cuba...
...When taps on Levison's phone "produced no evidence of Communist deviltry...
...The Soviet aim was described by Mikoyan at a secret meeting of Communist diplomats: to achieve "a definite shift in the power relationship between the socialist and the capitalist worlds...
...While designed to curb the undemocratic exercise of power, recent procedural reforms of the legislative and political process—as opposed to social reform aimed at reducing economic inequities—have largely benefited a Republican approach to government...
...The old university has begun to shake itself from its torpor: Harvard has reevaluated the curriculum, and the return to tradition will begin...
...The fundamentally critical stance of the press generally acts as a retardant on action...
...The 1974 election-law reforms were, for example, widely seen as an attempt to control the abuses of the electoral system by businessmen seeking special favors in return for massive contributions...
...She sees the book as part of a plot to bring "Kennedyism" (whatever that is) into the limelight...
...The Democratic party as a vehicle for coherent policy has been decimated by reforms eliminating its fund-raising and vote-gathering functions, and it has largely been replaced by a network of private consulting and polling firms without partisan or community ties...
...After February 7, 1965, when the Vietcong overran the airfield at Pleiku, "Johnson now made the decision to Americanize the war...
...Just as the famous commodity with which Capital begins has two faces, so also does the university have its contradictory visage...
...But this approach failed to recognize that special interests are, in fact, integral to the system: that a supposedly fair system controlled by detailed rules works to the advantage of those best equipped to interpret and maneuver within the rules...
...no matter that it is virtually impossible to imagine how the problems that now must, finally, be addressed can be resolved...
...Though a hard-line Stalinist to the end, Thompson had been a hero in two wars, in Spain against Franco and in New Guinea in 1943, when he won the Distinguished Service Cross...
...it is a widespread national consensus...
...Such a proposal would, of course, have to be entirely consonant with Israel's security requirements...
...The Palestine problem is not a figment of Sadat's imagination...
...These reforms have encouraged a change in the Democratic presidential constituency from a collection of minorities comprising a left-leaning majority toward an essentially white, middle-class majority, leaving minorities with fewer points of leverage...
...The military establishment would receive increased support, not only in inflated dollars but at least a real 3 percent booster shot, and this increase would be paid for in part by those least able to do so...
...The university offers a revaluation of all values, in an idyllic atmosphere where you can chat leisurely about the great and small ideas shaking the world or your neighbors...
...Today, they have no hearing, not against the background of the PLO, not against the background of the Arab response to Sadat, not against the background of what they themselves have accepted as conventional wisdom for these many years...
...Joy and celebration happened at desultory public rallies, and have long since been forgotten...
...No longer did one need to know foreign languages, to have a few insights about math or science (or to dip a bit into the humanities and social sciences...
...A critical consequence, in the last decade, has been the placing of a disproportionate share of the cost of government upon the working and lower middle classes, which in turn is a key to antigovernment sentiment...
...Begin's draft autonomy proposal, even if it were accepted as drafted, will not make it go away...
...Can you imagine—Barry Goldwater in Indonesia...
...WHILE THE SUBSTANTIVE REFORMER believes social and economic inequity can be corrected through government action, the procedural reformer assumes that changes in the rules governing the legislative and political process will result in a system that generates public trust, and in which no group has special advantage...
...as long as you have one, it is yours and thus good...
...The issue of which side ought to provide the first signal depends on the aegis of the discussion...
...By the middle of the '70s nearly a quarter of a century of unprecedented economic growth was interrupted by depression and inflation, by the horrid advent of stagflation...
...The Kennedy brothers have used their leadership to espouse liberal positions, positions that could be carried only by uniting disparate constituencies...
...But just as the institutionalized power is coalescing, reforms instituted in large part by those who claim to be progressives have seriously damaged the ability of the congressional Democratic party to function...
...Too many veterans of the '60s got tired...
...Kennedy opposed it and Schlesinger describes how, "Late in April," Lyndon Johnson recorded, "Bobby Kennedy came to see me" to urge a bombing pause...
...behind a candidate...
...for example, has assumed the chairmanship of the subcommittee on federal employee benefits...
...Self-knowledge...
...Combat between right and left shapes up as much within as between the parties...
...In full bloom, this amounts to the most restrictive elements of "classical liberalism": the government that governs least governs best...
...If the issue is allowed to be debated in terms of legal sovereignty, there will be no end to the debate...
...The emergence of a middle-class, rulemaking style of politics threatens the unstated consensus that government has a primary responsibility for its worst off...
...Very much to Schlesinger's credit as a historian, and to the discredit of both President Kennedy and Robert Kennedy, is the sordid story of the 266 electronic spying on Martin Luther King...
...On the one hand, he sent combat advisers to aid the South Vietnamese...
...this year, generally liberal Northerners will chair 20 out of 28 congressional committees...
...but most often it was viewed by campaigners as an outside force to be manipulated...
...Through public financing and encouragement of antipolitical campaigning, reform has helped saddle the Democratic party with a President lacking substantive vision...
...There is another history besides the one that takes class struggle as its starting point and revolution as the end of the route...
...Credits are offered for "life experience" (half tuition is better than none...
...To prevent the corrupt practices that prevailed in the 1972 Nixon campaign, reformers institutionalized the Political Action Committee (PAC...
...Advocacy of reform has become a sure ploy to gain publicity for junior members who in the past were relegated to years of anonymity...
...Replacement of this system with direct-election primaries makes commitments to the minorities in the traditional Democratic coalition a potential liability and again encourages a campaign strategy aimed at the white middle class...
...265 Though it is doubtful that the earth, or even the country, shall rise on New Foundations right away, it is certain that the presidential campaign now is on...
...But it was perhaps too easy a contest...
...In Israel, according to all recent reports, people seem bent on confirming Abba Eban's assessment that "some people can't take yes for an answer...
...It is not difficult to explain the response...
...What will draw you in...
...This was the age of "relevance," of knowledge for action, and for action now...
...But since values cannot be compared among themselves (in this view anyway), and because tradition was rejected en bloc, the university began to tear itself to pieces...
...The reform-inspired diffusion of congressional power has created a system of nearly 535 fiefdoms, each functioning more to prevent than to enact bills...
...You can have evening courses, weekend courses, even courses for the early riser...
...Their goals are class benefits—defeat of the labor-law reform bill or reduced capital-gains taxes—instead of the less significant advantages granted one corporation over another...
...Sadat may decide to drop his demands on behalf of the Palestinians, given the response of the Arab world to the Egypt-Israel treaty...
...try a minicourse or a weekend retreat...
...The proposed expansion of public financing would have an almost identical effect...
...Within every one of the minorities, including blacks, there are growing blocks of persons who do not see themselves as in need of a protective governmental structure...
...For the first time since the rise of McCarthyism an Attorney General has refused to treat a man's unwillingness to inform on others as a ground for withholding favorable government action in his case...
...He was serving a long prison sentence even though no longer in the party...
...The Department of Defense has a director of "defense education," Mr...
...Over the past decade, however, the movement for procedural reform has gone beyond a response to specific events and become a permanent institution...
...He makes his case on two counts: historic entitlement, and security considerations...
...The proliferation of subcommittees—there are now 279 in the House and Senate—was designed to encourage specialized knowledge but, in political terms, it has given every member of the Senate and every member of the House with a minimum of four years' seniority a subcommittee chairmanship...
...There were many setbacks along the way...
...It is not, in short, a wildly attractive plan...
...I could talk all the time about social welfare and trade unions and reform...
...When, by far, majority sentiment supported U.S...
...The backroom negotiators who ran the Democratic party have been replaced by specialists—most often lawyers—trained in the interpretation of rules...
...While Tip O'Neill and other prominent Democrats were pressing members of the House to vote for the common situs-picketing bill and against weakening amendments to the minimum wage law, junior members were discovering that votes against labor would produce increased campaign contributions...
...What he does not want is a situation that will lead to the assertion of Palestinian sovereignty...
...A basic premise of the Roosevelt coalition and its descendants in the 1950s and 1960s was a shared interest in a government that could be pressured to rectify social problems...
...In those circumstances Robert Kennedy helped devise the conciliatory steps that made it possible for the Soviets to agree to withdraw their nuclear weapons and arrive at a peaceful resolution of the most dangerous confrontation in this nuclear age...
...What are the results...
...All these alterations of campaign style have resulted, directly or indirectly, from the demand of reformers for a more "open" process...
...The bombing of North Vietnam was on...
...Jews and blacks no longer 264 have the political unity of 15 years ago, and the labor movement is stagnating...
...Conservative trends across the country result not only from a middle-class taxpayers' revolt but also from forces within the Democratic party that are hostile to any left-leaning tilt...
...The subcommittee system, in turn, weakens the leaders' power to control the flow of legislation and gives each junior member a turf of his own, almost entirely independent of the liberal leadership...
...The rapid growth in the number of directelection presidential primaries—from 17 in 1968 to 30 in 1976—has had a similar effect...
...The replacement of backroom party caucuses with formalized procedures was similarly designed to make the nominating process accessible to anyone...
...All this suggests that the peculiar blend of social and economic forces that went into creating a leftleaning Democratic majority is dependent on politics in the crass but beneficent sense...
...Our country endures longer campaigns than any other democracy...
...revision of income taxes at the expense of the working class and the poor...
...We are not dealing here with a distant desert called Sinai, but with a proximate territory called the West Bank, and Israelis have accepted for years—long before Mr...
...In Congress an extraordinary shift in power has taken place, based on seniority, away from Southern conservatives toward Northern and liberal senators and congressmen sympathetic to legislation benefiting urban interests, blacks, labor, and almost every element of the Democratic coalition...
...FOR SEVERAL GENERATIONS the electoral activities of socialists centered on the candidacies of Eugene Debs and Norman Thomas...
...One of the criteria by which the press judges the Democratic party is the extent to which a candidate is free of encumbering ties to the party machinery and special interests...
...This is where the economic crisis is transformed and becomes a crisis of values...
...In loco parentis" fell rather quickly and with little regret, but its demise was followed by a growing number of required or prerequisite courses...
...At the core of most reform lies the assumption that favoritism is not an integral part of politics but something to be eliminated...
...Republicans, sensing a conservative trend, get an incredible symbol, John B. Connally, of Watergate, Vietnam, and slush-fund fame, as he flings an expensive hat into the ring so early...
...The PLO leadership, it is said, would not be satisfied with the only kind of independence that is compatible with Israel's security requirements—to wit, a demilitarized state...
...Members of Common Cause pressing for enactment of public financing saw a danger in the influence gained by major private contributors and did not anticipate the consequences of their proposals...
...Election-day registration, a proposition killed last year in Congress by a coalition of supposed reformers and Republicans, would have provided at least the opportunity for a massive expansion of the electorate, most of it from the lower half of the economic spectrum...
...But there is more involved...
...And all this takes place through courses renamed for the occasion: since departmental funds are allocated on a per-head basis, a veritable race has begun: who will invent the most tempting packaging for whatever academic fare he or she will offer...
...If this help is not needed by the nostalgic elite schools, or the pridefully stubborn, is it the fate awaiting the extraordinary system of state universities begun just after the Civil War by the Homestead Act...
...Finally, we are seeing the establishment of new "Chairs of Free Enterprise," since capitalism appears not to be getting its own bit of turf...
...Time to savor, and then to speculate...
...Direct primaries are designed to prevent interference by party or boss in the selection of a nominee...
...263 Similarly, the growth of staff and office services, particularly computer services, has provided even the most junior member of the House with 18 employees, whose first job it is to make sure their boss is reelected, with a communications system providing an extraordinary capacity to respond quickly, and often effectively, to constituent requests...
...I REFRAIN from a detailed review of the substance of the West Bank problem, which is by now quite generally appreciated, as also of the Begin autonomy proposal, which is hardly a serious proposal...
...260 It is apparent that Jordan does not want to cooperate in being a keystone to such a solution...
...The critique of the monolithic traditional education, remembering what it had forgotten and what it had neglected, gave rise to a pluralism...
...Similar consequences can be expected from a number of additional changes now under consideration...
...The older cities in the North and Midwest are losing population, and their political leverage is shifting to the suburbs, and to the Sunbelt and the West...
...Time, perhaps as well, in which those who count themselves among the civilized will cease and desist from their senseless indulgence of the PLO, an indulgence that upon its every expression simply reinforces the widespread belief among West Bank Palestinians that PLO terrorism provides important political benefits...
...268 Open the Sunday New York Times, and you'll see three or four pages combine the tactics of advertising with the wisdom of the universities...
...Continued inflation and the declining power of the U.S...
...In almost every case, subcommittees serve a specific constituency of interest groups, which in turn assures the subcommittee chairman of a financial resource that insulates the incumbent both from local electoral challenge and pressure by the leadership...
...So the campaign will be waged in large measure within the two parties...
...This is perhaps not surprising...
...A tribute to its factual strength comes unwittingly from Decter herself...
...How do radicals function in politics when so much cries out for solution and so little is done...
...Failing time, the choice will remain a choice between intransigence and murder...
...Workers today have a good deal to lose...
...Their work has led to a major alteration of the political landscape...
...but what could someone say who didn't believe in these things...
...Perhaps it's not a world they'll be winning, but the progress of past decades may be resumed in the '80s...
...PAC was seemingly an ideal reformer's concept: under carefully prescribed rules, individuals could join together to form a group that would be allowed to contribute more—$5,000 to a specific candidate— than the maximum permitted to individuals— $1,000...
...Nor, from the PLO's perspective, is their program any wiser than it is moral...
...This is why some time is needed, an interval in which the first fruits of peace can come to be tested, and can whet the appetite for more...
...Another factor is the replacement of traditional precinct and ward leaders with persons specializing in mass appeals: pollsters, television consultants, PR men, and direct-mail specialists, a shift clearly favoring the middle class...
...Many profs would like to follow the lead—not just from "conservatism," but out of the frustration that accumulates when your students come to class with heterogeneous backgrounds, unequal preparation, and without the ability to write a coherent sentence...
...an approach to politics that places priority on maintaining advantages already gained and perceives any expansion of government as a threat...
...Kennedy has already exercised pressure on the Carter administration and rallied together with labor and the black movement to stem the rightward trend...
...The PLO has offered no reassurance that it would be satisfied to accept a West Bank-Gaza state as an adequate response to its demands...
...Public financing of congressional elections would have consequences very similar to presidential public financing...
...not Viennese hysterics but the neurotics of a perhaps lost generation that was nonetheless seeking itself...
...There appears to be a double crisis in the American university...
...IT'S NOT TRUE that you can't turn the clock back, or at least try...
...More of a welfare state, not less, is the answer to the problems of recession and unemployment...
...A decade ago, the press played a significant but essentially minor role, catching players in the political system when they stretched the rules too far...
...The moral setting created in large part by the press established an ideal setting for a Carter candidacy based on calculated avoidance of specific commitment and a cultivated ideological blurring...
...A thorn by any other name...
...Within days of the signing, speakers were being lined up for the 1979-80 season in synagogues and community centers across America, with the leading topic, "The Crisis of Peace...
...One result is a power vacuum...
...Coming back from a trip to Asia, Kennedy mused: "I kept asking myself what a conservative could possibly say to these people...
...The President assured him it was under consideration...
...of rewards for loyalty, not merit...
...The major device for maintaining this coalition has been to grant favors to separate groups...
...Thomas Carr, who is just as aware of the competitive struggle for youthful bodies as any college administrator...
...Are you bored, frustrated, in doubt...
...It was a system that clearly was not open but served partly, if inadequately, to force a presidential candidate to gear his appeal to the actual interests that make up the party...
...Many people disliked Robert Kennedy, but some of the hatred he earned can be cherished, such as the authoritative word in the FBI "that the two in the world J. Edgar Hoover hated most were Martin Luther King second and Robert Kennedy first...
...Early in Begin's administration, the Prime Minister emphasized historic entitlement...
...Some of the attacks from the right have taken on an almost hysterical timbre...
...Instead, there is a strong case to be made, with some preliminary evidence from the Carter campaign, that public financing works as a conservative force...
...the old-line pols of Illinois, New Jersey, and Maryland...
...An intensive program of Jewish settlement in the West Bank will not make it go away, nor will a thousand legal briefs that "prove" that the West Bank "belongs" to Israel...
...The President's budget proposals have served to define divisions between conservative and liberal positions...
...The procedural reformers are, in effect, functioning to produce substantive shifts to the right...
...At the same time, however, he does have to admit that, besides a share of the body count, the military will derive a further benefit from its investment: it will be able to use the hierarchical practices of the university for recruiting future officers...
...I have said that this was not the intent of the rebels...
...As some Americans of Southern and Central European descent are no longer tied to the working class, as Jews worry less over discrimination, and as Southern whites have abandoned the coalition, a commonality based on the sense of exclusion from national well-being has declined...
...Kennedy certainly endeared himself to me at the time of the Junius Scales case...
...Two strategies have emerged to confront this situation...
...In January 1966 Kennedy said: "We have spoken out against inhuman slaughters perpetrated by the Nazis and the Communists...
...The danger, then, of legislative "reform" is that the most powerful forces in the system will best be able to make use of it...
...Whether this was the inevitable result of the reforms or not, and whoever is to be blamed— those who gave in too easily, those who forced the issue by any and all means, or those who could not find innovative compromises—what is significant 269 is the way in which the relativist, balkanized, tradition-less university fits the present competitive climate on the pedagogical marketplace...
...It is possible that the right wing has overreached in attempting to expand welfare measures for the wealthy while slashing them for the poor...
...Those socialists, liberals, and labor activists who cast their lot with the New Deal in the '30s inaugurated a new tradition that has brought tangible gains to working people and minorities...
...Efforts to seek limits and, more important, reduction and elimination of the nuclear arms race are matters of urgent concern...
...They will learn, as the first lesson of peace, that at least one Arab, and perhaps one whole Arab country, can be trusted...
...But it is bound to be a disconcerting lesson, one that calls the conventional wisdom into question...
...If it is to come at all, it can come only as the consequence of a serious national debate...
...TIME, THEN...
...POLITICALLY, this appears to be a period of realignment...
...Begin's advent to power—the conventional wisdom that Arab rule over that territory will bring rocket shells into their living rooms...
...Then what other solution can there be, save for an Israeli initiative...
...No sooner does the President present a budget in early 1979 than battle lines are drawn for the 1980 contest...
...To keep peace in the party, it is essential to give labor a share, blacks their cut, city bosses a chunk, top elected officials a piece, and to save a few spots for major donors...
...Abolition of the electoral college and establishment of national or regional party primaries would both reduce the need for candidates to address specific concerns of major voting blocks within states—blocks that nationally are only minorities (blacks in Mississippi...
...It is a combination of exhaustion after 16 months of bickering, small-minded and miserly months punctuated by imaginative and daring days, and a sober assessment of the complexity of the problems, which can no longer be evaded, which are now in the middle of a road that must be taken...
...Now the press not only serves as a major judge of a candidacy, it also sets moral ground rules for campaigns...
...but his rationalization is...
...Such an initiative, however, is most likely to issue from the Begin government...
...What about the mesmerizing effect Robert Kennedy seemed to exercise over so many veteran critics of "the establishment...
...One factor forcing the Democrats toward the left in the past has been that party and elected officials saw their constituency as a coalition of minorities...
...Public financing puts fund-raising in a presidential campaign entirely into the hands of the Federal Election Commission—and thereby reduces the likelihood of direct purchase of a candidate...
...There is no serious debate within Israel regarding the Palestinian question...
...Given the current political climate within Israel, it might also have to provide for some continuing Jewish settlement in the area...
...Nostalgic recollections of the "Red Special" may be warming but hardly constitute a guide for political action...
...intervention in Vietnam, in 1965, Kennedy opposed it...
...Public financing, in effect, has created a power vacuum...
...The '60s were years of a wrenching and deep reform of the university—a reform not chosen or planned by the university...
...the obstacles will not be overcome by exhausted, dispirited people...
...We now have not only feminist, black, Jewish, or Puerto Rican studies, but the growth of a new mysticism correlating with the ambient relativism...
...Marxism, of course, suggests itself...
...Were the Israelis to propose a more interesting enterprise, there is at least some prospect that it would generate an important debate both among the Palestinians and among the Israelis...
...When Johnson escalated the war, Kennedy delivered an address, in July 1965, strongly opposing the Americanization of the war...
...But what theoretical understanding...
...Fire from the right, just as sharply against Carter, came from the Republicans who objected to social expenditures no matter how parsimonious...
...When Bobby Kennedy was winning the primary race in Indiana in his race for the 1968 presidential nomination he inspired both blacks and blue-collar whites to get together, to try unity instead of separation...
...THE PRESENT CRISIS of the university cannot be blamed on the economy, or on demography alone...
...Carr, it will need one out of every three of them over the next five to ten years if it is to keep its active-duty forces at 2.1 million...
...The aesthetics call for celebration, and only a healthy sense of what has been accomplished can offer the incentive to deal with the obstacles that have now come into full view...
...Perhaps it is Humboldt in Germany, Durkheim in France, or Dewey in America who need to be rethought...
...The shabby excuse that King's aide, Stanley Levison, was a Soviet agent is exploded by Schlesinger's detailed account...
...ONE REASON for the vacuity of Carter's domestic policy may well be that part of his primary campaign and his entire election campaign were financed with public money...
...From the point of view, then, of democracy as a process, the rebels of the '60s made their contribution...
...in the world have reduced public confidence in government, an essential ingredient in the Democratic faith...
...But favoritism has provided Iegitimate—and illegitimate—protection to minorities that would have little chance if their legislated benefits were put to public referendum...
...Or was it the kind of testimony Robert Kennedy presented to the Congress on the need for civil-rights legislation: The United States is dominated by white people, politically and economically...
...And this, in turn, means that it would have to insist upon total demilitarization of the West Bank, upon freedom of inspection to monitor the demilitarization, upon some restrictions on immigration policy, perhaps even on some continued Israeli military presence in specified enclaves...
...That system survived the attacks of McCarthy, of Nixon and Company, and went on to be one of the sources from which a new spirit emerged in the '60s...
...The story of the missile crisis of 1962 reveals the two contrasting but complementary aspects of American policy in the Kennedy administration...
...When that argument fell flat in this country—in Congress and even within the Jewish community—he shifted to an emphasis on security matters...
...Party leaders think in terms of cutting up the pie—in this case, seats in a state delegation—for the active interest groups...
...But it has one great virtue...
...All values are equal...
...But the critique became balkanized...
...Public financing frees a candidate from making commitments to constituent groups that have serious concern for specific legislation...
...Instead, it continues in a program of well-financed butchery, posing as a collection of romantic freedom fighters even as it murders women and children...
...Not Machiavelli but Marx was needed...
...Morally imperfect as it may be, private fund-raising forces a candidate to develop an internal, if unstated, consistency tying a candidate to a collection of interests that form the base for ideological coherence once in office...
...of the entire deal-cutting process that is essential to maintaining a fragile coalition in which shared interests barely outweigh potential conflict...
...We owe ourselves at least an overnight pass away from crisis—and we would be wise to take more...
...To read the one-sided appeals of the retired generals and then hear Norman Podhoretz on a TV program urging us on to an armament race, to greater toughness, greater nuclear-bomb competition is to wonder about the sanity of such hawks...
...The most extreme, at this writing, is an abusive assault on Kennedy in the form of a review of Arthur M. Schlesinger's recent book, Robert Kennedy and His Times, by Midge Decter in Commentary, December 1978...
...Perhaps grotesque, laughable, or frustrating for the nostalgic or the revolutionary (whose curious agreement on the nature of the university is worth noting), it forces us to think about the role of the university in a democracy, where it can neither avoid the present and the traditions that have made that present nor abdicate its unique role...
...On Capitol Hill, Common Cause lobbyists lurk in the halls more often than lobbyists for the oil industry...
...Until recently, the usual campaign strategy was to determine what it would take to get labor, blacks, Jews, big-city mayors, contractors with ties to local Democratic parties, etc...
...Discovery of hidden resources you've never known...
...on the other he opposed escalation and turned down the generals' proposals to send combat troops...
...The political battles for civil rights, for organizing the farm workers, for ending the war in Vietnam, against the dangers of authoritarian trends revealed by Watergate, all were hard to wage...
...Carr proposes a compromise solution, which comes down to offering to buy a piece of the action...
...At the extreme, the shift is represented by the replacement of James Eastland by Edward Kennedy as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee...
...These form a political subculture with a vested interest in expanding procedural reform, regardless of its effect on national trends...
...So let us celebrate...
...This was not the intention of those who had forced its reform...
...Who's on the right and who's on the left may be at times as difficult to answer as the "Who's on first" conundrum of Abbot and Costello...
...There is a history of democratization, and the university has a place in that process...
...The "black seat" on the Supreme Court marks a political debt of the Democratic party...
...All that publicity about which I spoke somewhat mockingly at the outset is perhaps not so venal...
...Scales had been the only Communist sent to prison under the membership clause of the infamous Smith Act...
...Or perhaps Robert Kennedy won the admiration of the radicals by giving the back of his hand to know-nothing and jingoist attitudes, and by opposing atrocities committed in the name of "fighting communism...
...The nostalgia of Harvard and the egalitarian mutual aid offered by the Department of Defense misunderstand the issue, as do those who condemn the '60s whole cloth...
...No matter that the major tasks still lie ahead...
...It is too soon, entirely too soon, to be taking the Egypt-Israel treaty for granted, to be bogged down by the Palestine question, or the West BankGaza question, or the Judea-Samaria question...
...On the surface a laudable goal, in practice, this encourages politicians to avoid taking controversial positions favoring minority interests, and instead to cautiously direct their appeal toward the white middle class concerned with saving tax dollars...
...In the absence of the kinds of signals scholars propose, the Israelis accept Nahariya and Tiberias as relevant signals...
...The shift from an active constituency of traditional party workers to a middle-class elite has had the secondary effect of granting extraordinary leverage to the press...
...Short of that, he wants the status quo...
...President Kennedy, as Schlesinger notes, left a divided legacy regarding Vietnam...
...THERE ARE AT LEAST three reasons why this book serves a useful purpose...
...Around the same time 267 the Defense Department denied burial in Arlington cemetary to Robert Thompson, an American Communist party leader...
...Reform attacks on a system of politics based on appeals to minorities have gained strength with the simultaneous deterioration of the Roosevelt coalition...
...Whatever his political future, Kennedy has shown the ability to form the kind of coalitions that have helped labor, the blacks, the poor, the young, the old, and the deprived to move forward...
...The treaty was in itself so remarkable an achievement, and so unexpected, that the event clearly calls for a substantial pause in order to celebrate and, however briefly, to enjoy...
...During the civil rights movement and the struggle against (and in) the war in Vietnam, a generation developed a new selfawareness and drove the university to transformation...
...A world in which Arafat can be termed a moderate, as he has come to be regarded in some "sophisticated" circles, is a world gone mad...
...Second, the book answers a question that mystifies many people, why so many hard-headed liberals and radicals were captivated by Bobby Kennedy...
...Allowing the press to assume the role of majority stockholder in the political process is like allowing a New England banker to have partial veto power over the corporate actions of a Sunbelt highway contractor...
...Organized labor PACs, in contrast, have remained relatively stagnant, growing from 201 to 275...
...If the economic news worsens, Robert Lekachman may be proved a prophet since he suggests that "congressional liberals will take heart, win allies among the moderates, and substitute some progressive measures for the social sabotage now projected...
...Victory in a revolutionary war is won not by escalation, but by de-escalation...
...It wasn't so iconoclastic or nihilistic as it appears today: the members of this generation became aware that under the pretense of a classical education they were being cheated out of knowledge about what was happening around them...
...Important in a given state, those minorities would become elective liabilities in a campaign geared entirely to a national constituency...
...Everybody got paid off...
...In the absence of such a plan, the predictions that this will prove an unprecedentedly difficult and acrimonious year are quite likely correct...
...Now the PAC approach encourages businesses to join together as a class to press their common interest...
...He stresses the twin problems of inadequate secondary preparation, and the debilitating effect that the competitive, hierarchical university structure imposes on students...
...This is the sinister purpose of the book, even though it deals at great length with Robert Kennedy, to some extent with John Kennedy, and hardly at all with Edward Kennedy...
...Since this was to be done by placing large numbers of nuclear missiles on Cuban soil, with nuclear bombers and 22,000 Soviet troops and technicians attending, the threat required, and the administration responded with, firmness...
...And who can say that they are wrong...
...More important, however, are the compound effects of the spawning of the business and trade association PACs...
...Perhaps the fury of some Commentary writers about the Kennedys is set off by their role in sponsoring affirmative action...
...Instead, every ounce of prospective benefit of the new EgyptIsrael relationship should be weighed up, every remaining kink gently massaged until the full strength of the relationship is realized...
...And, having celebrated, let us see how the acrimony that is so widely predicted for the months ahead might be avoided...
...It's an eye-opener to learn that, under Hoover, the FBI was indifferent to organized crime and that, in 1959, the FBI New York office "had over 400 agents working on communism, four on organized crime...
...This vivid account includes old and new information about the investigations of Hoffa and the crime syndicate, the infamous story of J. Edgar Hoover, the civil rights battles of the '60s, the Bay of Pigs and the nuclear missile confrontation with the U.S.S.R., and then the shadow over the entire period—Vietnam...
...Of most significance has been the attack on the structural basis of the Democratic party...
...Under the old, corrupt system, corporations were encouraged to compete for special government benefits—Pepsi Cola for the Russian franchise under Nixon, for example...
...It is no secret that he would prefer to concede as little as he possibly can on the West Bank...
...Begin himself would not endorse it...
...There are those in Israel who will want to take it another step...
...but he also avoided interlocking himself with forces that remain major influences in the legislative process: labor, Jews, big-city mayors, local political leaders...
...In their stead, there is a studied avoidance of the large international issues, or—when they are discussed—a chilling absence of hope...
...I do not know the mood in Egypt, but both in Israel and in the American Jewish community, the Israel-Egypt treaty evoked at best a shallow and ephemeral joy...
...He went so far as to defend the right of students—even though he said he disagreed with that type of action—to burn draft cards...
...There is also strong evidence that the consequences of tinkering with the elective process often differ vastly from the intended goal...
...An unexpected mainstay of these forces have been the procedural reformers, men and women often motivated by deeply felt and legitimate concerns: the abuse of executive power in Southeast Asia, Watergate, etc...
...The central question is whether there is any way in which the insistence of the Palestinians on genuine national self-expression and the insistence of the Israelis on their right to security and stability can be made compatible...
...His own long-standing preference remains the assertion of Israeli sovereignty over the area...
...From this perspective of democratization, the problems of the university are a sign of health...
...To a member of Common Cause seeking an elective process devoid of favoritism, this form of bargaining may be repugnant...
...In the same period, the number of trade-organized PACs grew from 318 to 529...
...Carr's egalitarian rhetoric, one might note, accords well with that of the New Left reformers during the '60s...
...Perhaps this relates to Kennedy's record regarding Vietnam...
...And the healthiest, most satisfying form of self-rule is, obviously, independence...
...Time that only the United States can provide, if, in this next round, it does not panic as it has so often in the past...
...no new social programs...
...And third, this is a solid book about our country's politics, about how political campaigns are won or lost, and how those who see politics as a means of achieving social progress can participate in the political process...
...Michael Harrington has written and Schlesinger quotes him about Robert Kennedy: "As I look back on the '60s, he was the only man who actually could have changed the course of American history...
...We created a monster," says Russell Hemenway, director of the Committee for an Effective Congress and one of the principal reform authors of the election law...
...Politics of this kind sent waves of poor Irish, Italians, and Poles through the network of 261 city-hall patronage and ultimately into the middle class...
...Also, that the impact of Senator Kennedy's action for health insurance, supported by the labor movement, will move the Carter administration to remember and to implement the entire 1976 Democratic platform...
...Military involvement with the university will thus be able to avoid the discouragement that leads to dropouts while keeping the university financially afloat and helping it to perform the egalitarian function it is supposed to perform...
...In both cases, the university has to change its agenda, ideals, and methods...
...Competition among universities for a share of the youth pool, and/or extension of the university beyond the usual age groups, thus realizing in a sense the dream of a permanent education...
...Was it, possibly, the support given by both the President and Attorney General Kennedy for the 1963 March on Washington...
...Begin's job ever so much easier...
...270...
...Here is a case where politics should walk in the footsteps of aesthetics...
...On the national scene, Senator Kennedy has been the most outspoken champion of the Democratic 1976 platform...
...In the face of the economic crisis, new aid has been proposed, from an unlikely source: the Department of Defense...
...That is why Congress should enact this bill...
...Those same workers and their elected representatives used the municipal contracting system to give ethnic builders and developers enough of an edge to begin to compete with the WASP establishment...
...Good Marxists might explain (or explain away) this persistence and growth in terms of the needs of capitalist industry and/or neocapitalist commercialization—and they would not be wrong...
...indeed, says Mr...
...He told Schlesinger later, "I don't think anyone now buried in Arlington would object to having Thompson buried there, so I don't see why all these living people are objecting...
...These suspicions are buttressed by the fact that many of the reforms, reflecting anti-Watergate and anti-Nixon sentiment, are weakening the ability of Democratic elected officials to line up majorities behind their proposals...
...it will exacerbate it...
...But I think there is another optic...
Vol. 26 • July 1979 • No. 3
