DAVE THE SLASHER & CAP THE KNIFE: HAPPY MEMORIES OF LIFE IN GIPPER'S GANG
Rosenberg, Bernard
Is ectoplasm in short supply on Publishers Row? If not, I wonder why his publishers did not supply David Stockman with good ghosts for the manufacture of his best seller, cleverly but...
...He first glorifies and then vilifies practically everyone who has crossed his path from childhood to middle age...
...Little David regarded his old man as a stick-in-the-mud...
...Overturning an existing order starts with one person and an idea...
...He sniffed, he gorged, he did not see...
...Anyhow, except for frills, it did not matter...
...And there would be more, so much more that it included "all [!] the literature of Western civilization...
...Where he came from "God voted Republican...
...When putsch came to shove" they let him down...
...And it shows...
...They are composed of top presidential advisers, endlessly thwarting him on his way...
...These numbers have tragic human consequences...
...There was so much out there to throw overboard...
...Papa must have been the exception...
...The Stockman who served our leader wanted to go whole hog...
...What a cutter was he...
...But poor old Grandpa Bartz remained intransigent: I had been hectoring him for some time now with my new views, and I wasn't getting anywhere...
...What issue could that have been...
...And so he was...
...Political science, psychology, sociology, history, theology and philosophy: "From Sumeria to the latest issue of Dissent, it was all there...
...Away with the Welfare State, which is what he and so many others now call New Deal and Great Society legislation that, at its height, still fell short of services established by Bismarck...
...Harvard was Shangri-la...
...Quoth the Earthly God "who had been shaped" by left-wing New York City culture but later became the prime "advocate of a contrariant [sic] viewpoint": "Don't be foolish...
...STOCKMAN IS EXCESSIVELY MODEST in characterizing himself as a mere ideologue...
...q 439 educated than most of the Gipper's Gang also clearly emerges from his material...
...Today, the child poverty rate has climbed to 21.3 percent...
...WHERE WERE WE...
...For minority children, the situation is even more grim...
...The idiot box was reality, so then they went after Stockman's hide...
...Don't alienate them, don't cut their programs...
...To his credit he does not conclude that we should therefore adopt totalitarianism...
...To explain it, Stockman resorts to Trotskyist talk, off-key as always...
...For Stockman at first the switch seems to have meant little else than exemption from the draft, a fact about which he felt no shame...
...Not Reagan, who chose to see his whiz kid as a victim of the media, kept him on board ("Dave, we need you"), and merely simulated an act of chastisement...
...His jolly colleagues of the Legislative Strategy Group noticed that a television commentator had "gone with" the Atlantic story two nights in a row...
...Here is a showdown in the Oval Office where Stockman pleads for a meager, illusory reduction in military expenditures...
...He let his hair grow long for awhile, no doubt distractedly, for his nose —no mention of his eyes—was buried "deep" in the Village Voice, Ramparts, and Thomas * The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed, by David A. Stockman (New York: Harper & Row, 1986...
...From Building America's Future (Detroit, Mich.: United Auto Workers of America, 1985...
...Who knows what doctrine stockbroker Stockman, the stock-man as ideologue, will next embrace...
...It was 1965, a fateful time for chameleons...
...It's also why the (Tom) Hayden Revolution failed...
...Energy subsidy programs could be thrown overboard," along with economic development in general...
...It made sense to the zealot who, with his usual thoroughness, had "studied Lenin's trip from Zurich to Russia in the boxcar, so I knew Wanniski wasn't talking historical rot...
...Over and over he displays an exquisite aptitude for translating whatever doctrine possesses him into rampant activism...
...In nineteenthcentury France...
...Careful study of Stockman's material will not unequivocally answer the question of whether he is still a true believer in supply-side economics...
...That foreign and domestic affairs are indivisible escapes him...
...Stockman reads something, mostly trash, but they read nothing...
...Corporal punishment did not have the desired effect...
...521.95...
...What was that cause...
...So yield to Cap...
...America ranks 14th in the world in keeping our infants alive in the first year of life...
...As a freshman, determined to uphold Grandpa Bartz's principles, he clung to them for whole months and then, very soon, Stockman reversed himself...
...He does not let us forget that before the flakiest New Right attracted him, he was an avatar of the flakiest New Left whose rhetoric never seems to have deserted him...
...Its outermost ideological reaches came to Stockman through people like Arthur Laffer, Jack Kemp and Jude Wanniski, who had written nothing less than a treatise called The Way the World Works, a book that hit Stockman "with the force of revelation...
...But throughout his contumacious account, nobody is treated with greater scorn than David Stockman himself...
...It appeared there on account of an article by William Greider, who quoted Stockman lambasting the administration...
...As county treasurer, Bartz had come to be "known and respected throughout the state...
...A total turnover right away is the point...
...Stockman could not cope with Weinberger...
...But this god too was to fail him...
...Be that as it may, the Stockman of 1980 believed the Wanniski who kept repeating that just a few people like himself could change the course of history: it was his "mantra...
...Is the national slogan Guizot's "Enrichissez-vous," delivered in subliterary English with a wink and a shrug...
...q 440...
...Which slogan had his erstwhile comrades used...
...Thus, the inner circle congratulated him when his name appeared on the cover of the Atlantic...
...Off he went in 1964 to Michigan State University...
...Also Harvard was "the Reverend Morrison's library on a vast scale," presumably encompassing all of Eastern along with all of Western civilization...
...It's why the (Ron) Reagan Revolution failed...
...And why not...
...And revelation would lead to revolution, the real Reagan Revolution fueled by supply-side economics...
...Dave the Slasher vividly remembers Cap the Knife...
...Does it matter...
...Decades ago David Riesman coined the term "other-directed" for a certain type of character structure—David Stockman's type...
...As A KID IN RURAL MICHIGAN, Dave really and regularly got taken to the woodshed by his father...
...They were as pestiferous as lobbyists, civil servants, special interests, congressmen—although he'd been one for two terms—senators, voters, false friends, Democrats, and, much less forgivably, Republicans...
...Every last gold-plated toilet seat had to be bought...
...David was gripped by ambition too, and with his customary felicity, he lets us know why: "Growing up on a farm instills you with ambition...
...Multitudes far and near, while ostensibly buying the ideology in general, grouped themselves to oppose those parts that would alienate too many constituencies...
...Man and boy, Stockman has been a dervish, a creature in constant motion finally working his head off for at least one cause, "the Reagan Revolution," in whose attainability he had lost confidence soon after his initial four-and-a-half year commitment to it...
...Among Hispanic children, nearly two of every five (39 percent) are poor...
...But if you want to take that responsibility, Mr...
...Fifteen years later, in the White House, it would be almost exactly the same...
...Even Papa Reagan temporized on fiscal matters: apparently inattentive, certainly out of his depth, Reagan had a habit, or a tic, that maddened Stockman...
...By then "even Walter Cronkite allowed himself to be critical of the Vietnam War...
...As a senior in high school he won an essay contest with "an ode" to Martin Luther King, Jr...
...let us be strong...
...Otherwise the Evil Empire would swallow us up...
...It was also an echo of Camelot with men like Galbraith and Richard Neustadt on the premises...
...What a witches' brew stirred in the wunderkind's head...
...Your constituents are the elderly, the farmers, and the veterans...
...As he only too believably tells us, his character was formed by a succession of role models, gurus, teachers, preachers, peers, two rabbis (John Anderson, a sometime rabbi, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, almost a full-time rabbi) plus one god on earth: "To me [Irving] Kristol was a secular incarnation of the Lord Himself...
...Words to that effect...
...society has experienced such a striking increase in poverty...
...He favored "perpetual," probably meaning permanent, revolution...
...The desk in his office was "cluttered with copies of Human Events, the Liberty Lobby newsletter, the Christian Messenger" and other such scholarly journals that David "used to explore with endless fascination...
...Soon after "chattering about how great Goldwater was and how he was going to save us from that socialist, Johnson," while a student at the "cow college" of his choice, young Stockman's "idealism" and desire to do good made him a full-fledged, if admittedly halfbaked "neo-Marxist...
...Almost one-quarter (24 percent) of all children under six live in poverty...
...But I cannot remember a case in The Lonely Crowd or, say, The Characters of Jean de la Bruyere more extreme than Stockman's...
...Meanwhile, cut...
...Nowhere does he object to the big military buildup as such...
...Altizer's God is Dead as well as "the mandatory classics of Camus, Ginsberg, and the other oracles of existentialist ennui...
...Not a god, perhaps, but at least a high priest of niggardliness...
...Neither does he very clearly repudiate it...
...then we can subdue Grenada...
...Don't cut...
...Never mind...
...Reagan does "not grasp the difference between constant dollars and current (inflated) dollars...
...Finally, I decided it wasn't any use, he wasn't going to let me enlighten him, so I resolved to keep it to myself...
...Sonny, the Plowboy of the Midwestern World, was the rule...
...In the end, everybody...
...When those in the Cutting Room who had been ordered to chop more out of social services did not agree on the exact amount, Le Cowboy would say, "Let's split the difference...
...The day before they denounced him, biggies like Meese, Baker, Regan, and Darman had, amid much merriment, presented him with a framed plaque for "the best cover story in the December 1981 issue of the Atlantic magazine...
...Wise men wrote about it centuries ago...
...Stockman had heard Lord Kristol address the House Republican Caucus, dispensing "political realism," that made Stockman the worshipper nervous...
...In fact, the poverty rate for children is now nearly double the poverty rate for adults...
...His fixation is domestic...
...As early as 1980, Stockman's faith had slipped...
...How did the incantation go...
...422 pp...
...Morrison, an "intellectual father," not the first and far from the last, was a man of "awesome" learning...
...In any event, the proximity of men who kept boarding the Washington-Boston Shuttle overwhelmed him: "It did not take long before I was thoroughly infected with the desire to find a place in the world at the other end of the shuttle...
...The rest is dismal history, execrably recorded...
...If not, I wonder why his publishers did not supply David Stockman with good ghosts for the manufacture of his best seller, cleverly but misleadingly called The Triumph of Politics.* One darkly suspects that much of the prose that makes a sensitive reader wince genuinely belongs to the author...
...That's what the teenage hayseed (his term) found in Reverend Truman Morrison's library...
...We have it from his own pen: "I was gripped by a vision of a better world even then...
...Black and Hispanic children have poverty rates that are substantially higher than the poverty rates for other children...
...Stockman was thrilled "beyond belief' to breathe the same air as these famous men...
...The stylelessness is the man...
...and Mahatma Gandhi in whom he saw "the distilled essence" of his grandfather's Christianity...
...Ever the ideologue of this-or-that or of neitherandboth, in the ripeness of his thirty-nine years, he has been all over the political map...
...Cut entitlements, Medicare and Medicaid, Supplementary Security Income for the aged, blind, and disabled...
...Take it from one who stayed with him through all his profundities, there is more and worse...
...The above is a little sampling of what subscribers to the Book-of-the-Month-Club who stay with Stockman, can glean from him...
...This tin god turned out to be an all-too-human heretic, no more worthy of deification than Caspar Weinberger...
...A heaviness comes over him as Weinberger speaks like the great courtier that he is: "Sir," he says, "you're the commander-in-chief and we will manage with any figure you give us: But you should be aware that there would be a serious risk in making any cuts...
...Politics...
...So the mature Stockman has come to know...
...On this feast he "fed greedily...
...He has, however, given us something that is not so much a book as a document to be studied for certain symptomatic peculiarities...
...An idea [apparently not the bearer of an idea] persuades a second person, then a third, then a fourth...
...Among black children, nearly half (46.5 percent) are poor...
...But I fear he will now never know that there are books and books...
...The very model, the role model to be surpassed, as Richard Nixon's budget director...
...The profligate secretary of defense "launches into a speech" that the Slasher had heard before...
...But it was the new Weinberger who prevailed, exceeding the Pentagon's wish list, securing every thousand dollar screwdriver, engorging contractors, a monstrous spendthrift finessing Dave, the skinflint...
...No other segment of U.S...
...Where are we...
...For the most vulnerable children—those under the age of six—the poverty rate is even higher...
...Stockman as head of the Office of Management and Budget didn't want to split anything...
...Even in his own eyes Stockman is no hero...
...That he has learned, however, about the only economics that works in this world—surprise-side economics— is to be doubted...
...President, it's all yours...
...An interesting proposition, the more so since it immediately precedes a characterization of his father, Al, the Stick, who did not dream of expanding his hundred acres...
...And how they made the budget director squirm...
...Only totalitarianism could have made the scheme or scam work...
...So the boy was imbued with religious and political fundamentalism...
...That he is poorly educated will be obvious even to the half-educated, and that he is better • Fifteen years ago, the child poverty rate stood at 13.8 percent...
...Over 13.4 million children now are poor...
...After graduation from MSU, Stockman was accepted as a divinity student at Harvard...
...Stockman in his own estimation "was far more sophisticated about books than the real world...
...What was a Cutting Room for if not to slaughter them...
...To hell with food stamps, AFDC, mass transit, revenue-sharing...
...We are, for 437 instance, confronted over and over with "central committees" and "troikas" in the White House...
...Of what did his comprehensive library consist...
...Stockman had counted on an ally, a man who had 438 been frustrated by Nixon's New Economic Policy (which, naturally, he likens to Lenin's New Economic Policy...
...If only we had heeded the earlier Weinberger, the rich would have become enormously richer and the poor might have perished instead of languishing in our midst...
...The faint-hearted who surrounded him merely nibbled at Social Security, education, conservation, safety, job training, hunger, and housing programs...
...What happened from one day to the next...
...The presidential clique that professed just as much devotion to free enterprise (i.e., full government control of the arms industry), monetarism (i.e., full control of the money supply by a federal agency) and a balanced budget and supply-side economics—this group continually betrayed the great cause for which he tirelessly fought...
...But Grandpa, William H. Bartz, who had a strong hold on the adolescent's psyche, was different...
...Swiftly, if circuitously, he did just that...
Vol. 33 • September 1986 • No. 4
