Out on a Rim

...It is worth quoting a passage...

...The crowning note (it turns out to have been a grace note) was the elevation of Nelson Rockefeller to the Vice Presidency...

...John Kennedy knew why Johnson would be useful to him in a very practical way, and the Texan merely proved to be a more complex figure than anyone had expected...

...There is a mildly upbeat coda to Sale's book—a brief account of the Yankee Counterattack that uncovered the Watergate scandal, forced Nixon's resignation and made Gerald Ford President...

...In retrospect, it may be that Nixon's greatest contribution will in fact have been in the area of foreign affairs, though not for the reasons (a generation of peace) he predicted...

...Without that, it would be another account of the dramatic movement of economic and political power from the Northeast to the band of states stretching from California to North Carolina, over the past 20 years the great growth area of the U.S...

...What I find troubling (and paradoxical) is that Power Shift was conceived and written in the Cowboy style when what it really needed was the Yankee touch...

...I don't think one needs this schematic paraphernalia...

...It was with Nixon that the Cowboys completed their conquest...

...For those unacquainted with the extraordinary growth of the region known as the Southern Rim, this book performs a useful service...

...Establishment, who supported the Vietnam War for reasons quite different from those of the martial Rimsters, though the end result was the same...

...Sale then trots out two explanations for the Nixon regime and Watergate...

...Although Rimology has been a specialty of political scientists, election analysts and economists for some time, never has it been treated with such high indignation...

...Sale's list of Yankees includes: "David Rockefeller, Charles Percy, Edmund Mus-kie, James Reston, Kingman Brewster, John Lindsay, Richard Lugar, Henry Ford, Sol Linowitz, Bill Buckley, and Stephen Sondheim.' The Cowboys are: "Bebe Rebozo, George Wallace, Lyndon Johnson, Billy Graham, Frank Irwin, C. Arn-holt Smith, H. L. Hunt, Strom Thurmond, Sam Yorty, John Wayne, and Johnny Cash...

...And yet," he writes (using one of his most frequent rhetorical ploys), and off he goes on another laundry list, this time of racial horrors that take him from the "hardscrabble masses of Placquemine Parish in Louisiana [to] the blank-eyed truckloads of dollar-a-day Chicanos in the Imperial Valley in California...

...Today," Sale observes, "the extent of organized crime's operations in the Southern Rim is clearly vast—indeed of incalculable proportions...

...The story is familiar...

...Sale tells us that "Documentary evidence to support every specific statement of fact in this book is cited in the Notes section beginning on page 313...

...The Cowboy Conquest begins with Lyndon Johnson...

...What gives Power Shift its special passion is Watergate...

...Sale notes that much has changed in recent years, that extraordinary progress has been made toward racial balance and harmony...

...But Sale needs a plot, and he finds it in the Rimsters' political takeover of the Federal government...

...consultant, Louis Harris and Associates Kirkpatrick Sale is a pamphleteer, an angry, impassioned, moralistic pamphleteer letting off broadside after broadside against his target...

...This is the Southern Rim, whose strength, as Sale sees it, is based on the "six pillars" of agribusiness, defense, technology, oil, real estate, and leisure...

...One is rooted in Nixon's Cowboy personality...

...For those who derive satisfaction from ritually reliving the fall and humiliation of Richard Nixon, it offers some good moments...

...Besides, as David Halberstam has documented at great length, the best and the brightest in the Johnson Administration were men of the Eastern...

...If the end to American imperial hegemony over the world is supplanted by a new penetration of the markets in both semidevel-oped (Russia) and developing (China) countries, if neo-imper-ialist arrangements are in fact struck allowing a non-national kind of exploitation of world resources, and if upstart American industries are placed in a strong position in the fight for these considerable treasures, then the Cowboy Strategy will have achieved its most lasting effect in the transformation of American foreign policy...

...the other built on an economic determinism that is simplistic, and confusing to boot...

...And we are treated to another spate of lists, long and ominous in their implications, but, once again, familiar: Rimian industries that contributed to the Nixon campaign, particular Cowboys who opened their pocketbooks, Rimsters in the White House, Cowboys in the Cabinet...

...For him, the character of the region is based on three Rs: Rightism, racism and repression...

...In this last, it relies heavily on lists that pile fact upon fact, name upon name, statistic upon statistic in a breathless effort to transform quantity into quality...

...And, of course, Richard Nixon...

...History informs culture," he declares, "and clearly the inhuman system of slavery and the bloody massacres of the frontier, though each long past, helped to mold the nature of the Rim...

...What a strange way of putting things...

...The quality turns out to be a certain numbness in the reader...

...For the facts dealing with the population decline in Los Angeles County, the relevant entry is "Los Angeles: NYT, 9/30/73, 6/16/75, p. 1." The last line of the volume reads, "By their fruits ye shall know them.' The entry is "Fruits: New Testament, Matthew, VII, 20...

...In Power Shift the play is between yankees and cowboys...

...Years ago the two main groups of American painters were characterized as coonskins and redcoats...

...For the purpose of this scenario, Sale ignores Johnson's liberalism to portray a Rightist who embodies and caters to the powers of the Rim...

...Reviewed by Kermit Lansner Former contributing editor, "Newsweek...

...Never have such thunderbolts been hurled at the Rim, the Rimsters who live there and the Rimian morality...

...He is selective in his evidence, easy in his logic and loose in his style—which is a compound of the colloquial, the journalistic, the exaggerated, and the almanacal...

...Sale is relentless...

...Now it is useful to have all the facts gathered here together in one place: how much money Washington has poured into the Rim, how many far Right groups flourish there, how generous the Rimsters were to the Democrats during the Johnson years and to the Republicans during the Nixon years, how many con artists, grafters, mass murderers, and political assassins inhabit the sunny stretch from San Diego to Miami Beach, not to speak of good old-fashioned criminals...