BOOKS
BOOKS An energy platform lor the '80s Nark Northcross THE POLITICS Or ENERGY by Barry Commoner Alfred A. Knopf. 101 pp. $10 hardcover. $4.95 paperback At face value The Politics of Energy would...
...With World War II approaching, he schemed, lobbied, and maneuvered to push atomic research and was the ghostwriter of the Einstein letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt pointing out the possibility of creating an atomic bomb...
...In increasing women's options, without making it acceptable to forego having a family, and in failing to broaden men's sense of responsibility toward their home lives, we have only increased our burdens and potential for lack of fulfillment...
...Several years later, when as a science editor I began to understand what was going on in biology, I had another example of Szilard's prescience...
...In these tragic days when it is fashionable to speak of the Indochina war as a tragic mistake, Shaw-cross's message deserves a wide audience...
...In addition to this mountain of paper, editors Spencer R. Weart and Gertrud Weiss Szilard had available tapes made by Szilard in his abortive attempt at an autobiography...
...My impression, possibly mistaken, was that this was penance for having let the genie out of the bottle...
...We'll just slip the word to them that 'for God's sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about communism...
...The fundamental analytical tool of national energy policy is a sophisticated computer model known as the Project Independence Energy System (PIES), created under the Nixon-Ford Administration...
...Perhaps their lives have been mined with peril and any status quo looks like peace____ The idea of taking a risk looks like an invitation to disaster...
...257 pp...
...The forces of history, rather than its personalities, fascinate Merk and shape his views of the westward movement...
...war effort...
...Gruesome sidebar SIDESHOW: KISSINGER, NIXON, AND THE DESTRUCTION OF CAMBODIA by William Shawcross Simon and Schuster...
...and Soviet scientists together for the first time...
...As computer programmers say, "garbage in — garbage out...
...Both then and now, the demands for new weapons "had nothing to do with the nation's defenses...
...Neither political party could be responsive to these demands without destroying its precious relationship with the powers that be...
...Fortunately this was never carried out, and Szilard continued at the laboratory in his gadfly role...
...Most of the younger interviewees are grouped here, as are those whose life situations (such as divorce) forced basic changes...
...The war fever currently gripping Washington will be seen as part of a long and dishonorable tradition in American political life...
...Merk himself is no exception...
...Whether dealing with the mountains, the plains, or the deserts, Merk knows the lay of the land, the composition of the soil, the factors of wind and water, and other aspects of the physical environment so essential to development...
...Generally these are the oldest interviewees, the ones who spent "decades of adjusting and elaborating one series of life choices...
...At the other end of the spectrum are the Change Innovators...
...fortunately for historians, the only things he bothered to collect were papers: filing cases full of letters, memoranda, documents, petitions, and notes...
...380 pp...
...He and Franck met with Matt Connelly, Truman's appointment secretary, who suggested they meet with James F. Byrnes, whom Szilard and Franck did not know was slated to be Secretary of State...
...It should be...
...Historian Barton Bernstein has reported that recently declassified material, apparently not available to the editors of Leo Szilard: His Version of the Facts, indicates that at one point relations had deteriorated to such an extent that Arthur Compton, the Nobelist in physics and director of the Chicago laboratory, ordered Szilard out and suggested Army surveillance...
...9.95...
...Brommel rightly insists upon the significance of Debs's rhetorical skills, as editor, writer, and orator, in bringing his radical program — including resistance to conscription during World War I — to a large audience...
...The lives of the women Goodman calls Change Resisters reflect no impact of the women's movement, but this is because they have chosen to pass up new opportunities...
...However, what tension is created by the embarrassingly typical plot of two couples entangled by sexual flirtations while visiting a farm for a weekend is simply voided by the families' departure...
...In 1965, Prince Norodom Sihanouk allowed the Vietnamese revolutionaries to establish base camps in eastern Cambodia along the border with Vietnam...
...Even by the standards of that group he was special...
...On June 14 The San Francisco Bay Guardian quoted Commoner in reference to this analogy: "What this country needs is an analog of the Republican Party of that time...
...Byrnes was clearly not interested in their views or suggestions, and Szilard, for his part, found Byrnes hostile and bitterly anti-Soviet...
...President Carter has succeeded admirably in implementing the first two elements: The prices of oil and natural gas have increased dramatically during his term, and inflation is now rampant throughout the economy...
...13.95...
...The Lon Nol regime was astonishingly inept and corrupt...
...Extending the war to Cambodia was compatible with Nixon's "madman theory of war...
...Biology, he had decided, provided the most profound challenge, an opportunity to study and understand the most incredibly complex and subtle mechanism, man himself...
...To this study, he knew, the disciplines, the skills, the refusal to believe that anything is unknowable — the entrepreneurship, if you will, of the physicist — had a significant contribution to make...
...Solid analogies drawn from everyday life are essential to this kind of writing, and The Politics of Energy is eminently readable and enjoyable on that account...
...Strange things are happening in Washington these days...
...I met Szilard when, as a young editorial writer at the Chicago Sun, I was drawn into his orbit to help him in his most successful crusade, the fight he organized and led to defeat the May-Johnson bill that would have given the military control of atomic energy...
...The generals argued that the destruction of COSVN, the command post of the revolutionaries' army, was a key to winning the Vietnam war...
...Other writers besides Commoner, most notably Amory Lovins (The Road Not Taken), have offered us a systematic vision of an economy entirely fueled by renewable energy sources, but only Commoner lets us in on the Catch-22 that neither the energy companies nor the major political parties are going to make the vision real for us...
...A decade ago radical feminist activists, with all the fervor and optimism of any born-again believer, predicted that sex roles and sexual inequality would soon give way to a new kind of society, free of the violence, authoritarianism, and oppression that has characterized patriarchal power...
...He fails to understand the just nature of the Vietnamese liberation war and the degree to which all Indochina depended upon its success...
...Anyone who wants to understand these bizarre events would do well to consult Walter Karp's new book, The Politics of War...
...The simplicity of style beautifully reflects a child's perceptions...
...Beginning with a cursory glance at the Indian past, Merk quickly moves to European settlement and the first opening of a North American frontier...
...He has a conspiratorial outlook on the world so deeply ingrained that every piece of evidence seems to fit it...
...In London in 1933, while waiting for a traffic light to change, he conceived the possibility of a chain reaction and took out a patent, which he assigned to the British Admiralty to keep it secret...
...It is an energy platform for a third party...
...History of the Westward Movement proves there is yet life in the doctrine of the frontier...
...But not enough...
...He seemed to delight in provoking General Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project...
...A treaty that calls upon the Russians to destroy some of their weapons and limits their production of others is under attack for the astounding reason that it is a manifestation of American weakness...
...Again to quote Merk's mentor, Frederick Jackson Turner, "if one would understand why we are today one nation, rather than a collection of isolated states, he must study this economic and social consolidation of the country" against a background of frontier history...
...After the war in Europe ended and preparations were made to test the bomb and use it against Japan, Szilard organized a petition campaign among the Chicago scientists urging that, on both moral and political grounds, it was not necessary to use the bomb against Japan...
...This is an interesting perspective, and a much needed correction to vulgar Marxism, but all it does is substitute a political determinism for an economic determinism...
...Sideshow is not without flaws...
...The anti-SALT campaign, the MX missile, and the Committee on the Present Danger will all be seen as attempts by a reactionary elite in Washington to gain power by distorting the world so that energy company ripoffs, inflation, and recession will go ignored...
...It was unplanned...
...What was his special quality...
...Political debates, in both periods, "did not change public opinion," but "poisoned the atmosphere in which opinions were discussed...
...Each woman interviewed indicated clearly that she first considered the impact on a man of her attempts at greater freedom, even if ultimately she decided against the course which would most satisfy him...
...Its potential for enhancing man's life and conquering disease may, after all, be sufficient penance for the insight, while waiting for a London traffic light to change, that energy could be released by splitting an atom...
...Szilard's view, and it was heretical then even in his own tight scientific community, was that the Russians could develop a bomb of their own within three or five years after we exploded one...
...U.S...
...4.95 paperback At face value The Politics of Energy would not tell a typical reader of The Progressive anything more than the reader already knows...
...it was a crime...
...Let's not get fooled again...
...Although he mentions big business, the parties dominate the capitalists, not the other way around...
...Concerned that Hitler's scientists might get a similar idea, Szilard came to the United States to work on nuclear physics, unpaid, at Columbia...
...As a 58 / september 1979 mixture of journalism and history, it is most successful in drawing an indictment against the Nixon Administration...
...What she discovered is disheartening...
...THE POLITICS OF WAR by Walter Karp Harper & Row...
...The indiscriminate bombing failed to defeat Lon Nol's opponents...
...While The Politics of Energy leaves us hanging in thin air with this historical analogy, Commoner has been more forthright speaking in public...
...So what is the public to do...
...Indeed, the parallels between the wars he describes and the current period are devastating...
...Karp's book is angry and cynical...
...It is necessary to start redefining relationships, to create new expectations for future generations, that will give men and women a chance for a true partnership in life or the societal support to avoid such a strong commitment...
...From the dark days of the Indochina war to the drama of Watergate, Cambodia was a sideshow, a gruesome sidebar to the larger story out of which it developed...
...In addition to being the most comprehensive collection of writings by one of America's authentic literary radicals, The Radical Will contains a useful introduction, by editor Olaf Hansen, on the absence of a visible Marxist tradition in this country and Bourne's relationship to that phenomenon...
...265 pp...
...Goodman places Marabel Morgan and Phyllis Schlafly in this category, but they have, in a sense, the best of both worlds: While winning plaudits from conservatives for their traditional views on sex roles, they have all the freedom and fulfillment of liberated women...
...MIT Press...
...Aside from his fascinating science fiction stories, The Voice of the Dolphins, this is the first opportunity the nonscientific reader has had to sample the distilled essence of Szilard...
...The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development...
...aid served to weaken Phnom Penh militarily rather than bolster it...
...When someone in Congress promptly sponsored a bill to allocate the required sum, the Carter Administration managed to get the allocation cut down to $98 million...
...In History of the Westward Movement, Frederick Merk, himself a student of Turner and later his successor at Harvard, rounds out his own considerable contribution to the Turner tradition with what may come to be recognized as its most comprehensive treatment...
...f Inflation in energy prices causes inflation throughout the economy...
...A few days after the Reichstag fire he left Germany, first for Austria and then England...
...Goodman found one college-age interviewee longing for the time when choices were fewer...
...I shook hands with Fermi and I said I thought this day would go down as a black day in the history of mankind...
...Well, the revolution has not, of course, happened...
...Finally, Karp's outlook on the world is that the political parties are the engines of despotism...
...Karp clearly wrote The Politics of War with current events in mind...
...These women have converted their past hurts into strength and their dependency into self-reliance...
...Haldeman, "to believe I've reached the point where I'll do anything to stop the war...
...During the war against Germany, the brilliant, creative scientific elite mobilized to create the ultimate weapon were untroubled by questions of morality...
...Nor is it yet dead, for "the open frontier has become one in the realms of science and technology, of man's control over the environment, and of the relations of man to his fellow man...
...Much of Cambodia was turned into a free-fire zone as B-52s pulverized villages and countryside alike...
...Lincoln used military courts, suspended habeas corpus, and interfered with free speech...
...Although it was widely recognized that Lon Nol was mentally unstable and incapable of raising and leading a conventional Cambodian army against the Vietnamese revolutionaries and the tenuous alliance forged between Sihanouk and the leftist Khmer Rouge guerrillas, Kissinger developed such a strategy in October 1970, complemented by the lavish use of U.S...
...In March 1969, Nixon approved a secret bombing campaign designed to destroy COSVN...
...JackColhoun (Jack Colhoun is a historian who specializes in post- World War 11 American military and foreign policy...
...Szilard recalled: "There was a crowd there and then Fermi and I stayed there alone...
...The reader is left unsatisfied as Lurie skirts any serious commitment to the theme by casually dismissing the relationships the novel set out to explore...
...The book documents in workmanlike fashion Debs's effort to learn "to speak and make people understand," from his school days in Terre Haute, Indiana, in the 1860s, until his death there in 1926...
...This is the frontier now challenging the national energies...
...Sideshow should be required reading for those with this peculiarly American affliction...
...Alan Wolfe (Alan Wolfe is on the staff of the Institute for the Study of Social Change at the University of California, Berkeley...
...His praise for the republican tradition is so great that he overlooks its defects...
...However, when Nixon and Kissinger moved into the White House, the military was given a go-ahead...
...American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West," wrote Frederick Jackson Turner...
...William Grant (William Grant is director of American Studies and associate professor of English at the University of Louisville...
...he shows us that what we want in the way of alternative energy is not going to come from President Jimmy Carter, the energy companies, or any other appendage of the corporate establishment...
...dent proved himself to be a master of public relations during the 1976 election campaign...
...Women's options TURNING POINTS: HOW PEOPLE CHANGE THROUGH CRISIS AND COMMITMENT by Ellen Goodman Doubleday...
...American war strategy would inevitably extend the war to the entire nation...
...Because his message is so true and so powerful, one wishes that Karp could restrain himself from time to time...
...It is of contemporary interest for two reasons: it is an intriguing, first-person history of the genesis and development of nuclear energy and the bomb, and it is a disturbing firsthand description of how the poisonous fallout from the bomb ushered in the Cold War...
...Here is just one: On December 2, 1942, Szilard and Enrico Fermi were surrounded by cheering, jubilant colleagues as a graphite-modulated reactor, designed by Szilard and Fermi, went critical, proving that a chain reaction and the release of awesome energy from fission were possible...
...However, Commoner's recent actions advocating a third party in 1980 speak louder than his words...
...If Woodrow Wilson seems, at one brief moment, to want peace, that is because he really wants war...
...A courageous few were willing to trade in their secure, but mediocre, lives for the challenge of the unknown...
...This leads him to state that "in a searing conflict that threatened the very survival of the Republic, Americans, under Lincoln, enjoyed every liberty that could possibly be spared," which is grossly inaccurate...
...Instead of aiding the war in Vietnam, the war in Cambodia diverted personnel and resources from Vietnam...
...That letter led to the creation of the Manhattan Project and Szilard's move to the University of Chicago...
...467 pp...
...In his epic treatment of "the greatest migration of people in recorded history," he deals with the opening and development of every section of the country and ranges in time from 1606 until as recently as 1975 and the enactment of land-use laws meant to correct some of the ecological abuses stemming from frontier attitudes toward the environment...
...Shawcross should be commended for bringing the war out of the shadow of larger events...
...Both parties found overseas adventure to be the most effective way to preserve their privileges in disturbing times...
...His handling of the events surrounding the establishment of Texas as a republic and its eventual admission to statehood, for example, is a classically clear and precise description of one of the most complex political and diplomatic episodes of western American history...
...Both wars changed America...
...Reading The Politics of War will be helpful in combating them...
...Robert N. Schwartz (Robert N. Schwartz is a former science editor who is now a public relations consultant...
...Article IV charged Nixon with waging war on neutral Cambodia and concealing the war from Congress and the American people...
...Nearly a hundred years after those words were delivered before the American Historical Association in 1893, Turner's thesis remains the dominant theory of American westward development...
...Box 914, Chicago, Illinois, 60690...
...The Kissinger-Nixon war in Cambodia set the stage for the brutal postwar Pol Pot regime and the subsequent fighting between Cambodia and Vietnam...
...And finally, apparently not satisfied with the precarious peace that has somehow survived among the major powers since 1945, numerous Washingtonians are running around insisting that World War III is about to happen...
...Parties, as Antonio Gramsci noted, organize and bring together factions of capital, which is what makes them essential...
...By 1920, the republican tradition, which emphasized resistance to oppression, independent citizens, localism, virtue, and control over one's destiny, had been replaced by a doctrine of national security, which spoke of obedience, conformity, centralization of power, and secrecy...
...From the ruins of the war, the republican cause has never revived to rally free men...
...1 want the North Vietnamese," Nixon told H.R...
...The stakes are going to be high in the 1980 elections...
...The reader leaves behind the confines of the adult world to travel with the Hubbard family on a symbolic journey that results in a blurring, and ultimately a reversal, of the normal parent/child roles...
...Some of these women, whom Goodman calls the New Middle-ground, are satisfied with the small changes the women's movement has made possible in their lives...
...Following the Revolutionary War, Merk writes, "a union of states was formed in which sectional differences developed between the Northeast, South, and West, over issues that were largely economic...
...660 pp...
...Hence it is propitious to have available for a wide audience Leo Szilard: His Version of the Facts, a volume of his collected writings...
...Other women are not so content: Their lives are punctuated by frequent moments of quiet rage as their desires for independence and respect as an equal are continually thwarted...
...They feel duty-bound to adhere to the traditional sex roles around which their relationships are based...
...The guardians of our "security" have nasty plans in store for us...
...His most recent book is "The Limits of Legitimacy...
...By then he had forsaken theoretical physics to work in biology...
...They and their husbands have accepted as much growth as their relationships could tolerate...
...As the failure of U.S...
...Wendy Schwartz (Wendy Schwartz, a civil rights and peace activist, is on the editorial board of Win magazine...
...From these varied threads, the editors have woven a tapestry from which emerges the picture of a man and an era...
...air power...
...Though their hypocrisy is maddening, most Change Resisters provoke only sympathy and sadness...
...Over this complex regional history rushed the currents of the post-World War II American attempt to keep Vietnam and the Third World within its orbit...
...Even though younger women are less bound by past restraints, they are not completely immune to yesterday's dreams...
...In presenting an alternative to the energy policy which resulted from this "garbage in — garbage out" syndrome, Commoner sets forth three basic elements of energy policy: f The price of nonrenewable energy resources must inevitably increase, while the price of renewable sources will decrease or remain constant...
...Szilard's passion was ideas, not things...
...Leo Szilard, the obstetrician of the nuclear age, was privileged to have the same role in the birth of molecular biology...
...But at that point, as Szilard pointed out, there was more than $2 billion invested in the bomb — and it had a momentum and the inevitability of a Greek tragedy...
...One can't help but be appalled by the amount of ego damage these women must have suffered to have so little self-esteem...
...strategy in Vietnam became inescapable, underscored by the Tet offensive of 1968, General William Westmoreland and the Joint Chiefs of Staff sought authority to destroy these Cambodian sanctuaries...
...More than one woman thought she deserved no more than the subservience required of her...
...He uses the words "mendacious" and "fugelman" so often that one would think he invented them...
...Szilard started over and found a Kansas City connection for an approach to President Harry Truman...
...In a work notable for its range of subject matter and depth of treatment, History of the Westward Movement contains particular sections which exemplify Merk's historical method...
...Just as each section of the country beyond the easternmost beaches was once the West, so policies and traditions reflecting frontier attitudes are so ingrained in the national life as to make the West, for Merk, a living force long after the last chapter in the history of settlement was written...
...As Goodman points out, "These women don't want to wipe out the past, but to incorporate the best of it into the future," They find, however, that the future contains little that is different from the past...
...Now women are being told that to be fulfilled they must have a career and a Prince Charming...
...244 pp...
...From reading this book, one gets a sense of how future historians will judge the current agitation over the Soviet threat to American security...
...In 1916 and in 1979, "the entire country lived in fantasy and breathed propaganda...
...Ellen Goodman's interviews with nearly a hundred women turn the spotlight on the intimate, as she illustrates how feminism has provoked crisis and commitment, both personally and in relationships with others...
...15...
...Merk's book is the study Turner envisioned...
...Indeed, Commoner points out how the President recently succeeded in torpedoing a Federal program that would have resulted in the broad commercialization of solar photovoltaic cells within a five-year period...
...He showed himself to be a pioneer in the art as well when he carried it into the hitherto uncharted realms of computer modeling in his efforts to get Congress to adopt the National Energy Act...
...Commoner foresees that failure to make renewable energy a reality will ultimately result in economic decline, nuclear accidents, and war in the Middle East...
...Child and parents reverse roles Only Children, by Alison Lurie (Random House...
...Books Briefly 'Tongue of the working class' Eugene V. Debs: Spokesman for Labor and Socialism, by Bernard J. Brommel (Charles H. Kerr, P.O...
...troops to eliminate COSVN could not have occurred while Sihanouk was head of state...
...Merk's sense of the disastrous results of unplanned development of our western areas grows out of his sensitivity to the physiographic qualities of the various sections of the country...
...Shawcross's discussion of Indo-chinese history lacks sustained analysis...
...After the U.S...
...Under that Doctrine, air power was employed politically to demonstrate "the fear-someness of Presidential 'irrationality' " and Washington's unshakable commitment to its Phnom Penh and Saigon clients...
...His chapter on Mormonism in Utah brilliantly interrelates the physical environment, religious and cultural forces, and economic necessity which combined to generate a community unique in the national experience...
...The social, political, and economic impediments to women's liberation are history — and current events...
...Anthology of Randolph Bourne The Radical Will: Randolph Bourne — Selected Writings 1911-1918, edited by Olaf Hansen (Urizen Books...
...Only a small minority of women, largely lesbian feminist separatists — a group not represented in Turning Points — have been able to bypass those traditional struggles, and their lives may in some ways be as artificial as those of the women in the book...
...A President has committed the United States to a mobile missile system that is predicated on the assumption that the United States, despite the most formidable arsenal ever created in the history of the world, is currently vulnerable to Soviet attack...
...Government must allocate significant amounts of capital if alternative energy sources are to be commercialized...
...Through a child's innocent observations, Lurie candidly exposes the failings of the adults while likening their insecurities to a child's vulnerability...
...Search and destroy missions, interdiction bombing of supply lines from North Vietnam, and a coastal blockade of South Vietnam forced the Vietnamese liberation forces to use new logistics routes...
...But Barry Commoner does more in his latest book than just tell us that solar energy is good and nuclear energy is bad...
...17.50 In the fifteen years since his death, Leo Szilard's relevance both as a scientist and a man passionately committed to enabling humanity to achieve its potential has been perceived beyond the small worlds of theoretical physics and, more recently, molecular biology...
...COSVN was never located, let alone destroyed...
...Although Bourne, as Christopher Lasch suggests in the preface, fits into no neat category of thought, Marxist or otherwise, he was one of the first American critics to take a world culture seriously and to view American literature, film, education, and politics within that context...
...All wars, including republican wars, violate the principles of a just and free community...
...Many still separate Kissinger from Nixon's crimes...
...The Politics of Energy gives credit to another man who is also deft with numbers: Jimmy Carter...
...Barry Commoner wants a third party by 1980, and he wants it to run a Presidential candidate...
...They suggested that the bomb be detonated in some unoccupied area as a demonstration that would serve the purpose of ending the war...
...Federal researchers concluded during 1977 that a mass Federal purchase of photovoltaic cells' over a five-year period at a total cost of $440 million would bring the price of those cells down from $10/watt to about $.50/watt (nuclear power plants cost about $ 1 /watt...
...Overseas events were distorted, manipulated, created, and ignored, all for the purpose of dragging the American people, who wanted peace above all else, into wars that would engage their hearts and minds — and also leave privilege untouched...
...In the 1920s, Szilard, who had moved to Berlin to study physics, became concerned over the growing Nazi movement...
...Commoner, however, is so deft with numbers in his prose that he gets away with what would otherwise be an unforgivable omission...
...Why go to war...
...It is difficult to find a frontier historian, especially of Merk's generation, who does not to some extent share the optimism which is itself one of the characteristics of frontier America...
...Although Shawcross couldn't find direct evidence linking Washington to the March 1970 toppling of Prince Sihanouk, the April 1970 invasion of Cambodia by South Vietnamese and U.S...
...On both occasions, "the American people were invariably described as demanding what the propagandists were trying to get them to accept...
...Goodman's only counsel is to "keep open the dialogue between the past and the present" as a way of dealing with future decisions...
...Rarely exposed are the personal roadblocks — our basic needs for love and security — which interpret most attempts at change as a threat...
...They are willing to question, even reject, the idea that a woman's life must be shared with a man...
...Developing haphazardly — and too often at the whim of exploiters and speculators whose only motive was personal or corporate greed — the frontier became the soil in which the seeds of the troubled present were sown...
...The fact that most of Bourne's writings belong to the early Modernist period, the years marking "the end of American innocence," makes them particularly valuable as models for social criticism in our own time...
...290 pp...
...In an era when "interdisciplinary" has become an academic buzz word, every page of Merk's book shows the range of social, technical, cultural, and historical knowledge that is implied by that term, though he no doubt thought of it only as history...
...they were in a race with the forcesof darkness to create the weapon that could save humanity...
...We can't restrain him when he's angry — and he has his hand on the nuclear button...
...in 1929, he transferred his funds out of Germany and kept two bags packed, ready to move quickly...
...The Politics of Energy draws an analogy between our present political situation and the inertia that gripped the major political parties of the 1840s and 1850s when confronted with the issue of slavery...
...On both occasions, domestic reformers were building up political strength for their attacks on power and privilege...
...Karp examines two wars "which altered forever the political life of the American Republic": the Spanish-American War and World War I. His thesis is simple...
...Left out of the present volume, which ends in 1945, are an account and documentation of Szilard's varied postwar social, political, and literary activities, which included organizing the Council for a Livable World, efforts to mobilize world opinion to control population, his science fiction stories, The Voice of the Dolphins, and the suggestion which led to the Pugwash conferences which brought U.S...
...Nonetheless, Cambodia became what Nixon called "the Nixon Doctrine in its purest form...
...Shawcross's enthusiastic support for the Cambodian underdog sometimes obscures these major historical forces...
...In July 1974, the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives voted down Article IV of the articles of impeachment of President Richard Nixon...
...in fact, the Khmer Rouge mushroomed as the result of U.S...
...In Sideshow, British journalist William Shawcross presents a compelling case against the former President and his chief foreign policy adviser, Henry Kissinger: "Cambodia was not a mistake...
...Even while recognizing that "conquest, speculation, exploitation, and violence were all part of this crusade into the wilderness," he maintains that "the hope of the future is that all the optimism, all the indomitable will to overcome obstacles, all the love of freedom and of the democratic process, and all the determination to make things better for the future, which the old frontier nourished and symbolized, will remain part of American thought and aspirations...
...Under the influence of unchecked economic pressures, "the process by which a transcontinental wilderness was converted into a civilized society was in one respect like the work of the elements...
...17.50...
...strategy...
...Groves went further: He drafted an order for Szilard's incarceration as an enemy alien...
...588 pp...
...Once it became clear that the war with Germany was drawing to a close, Szilard and then some of the others began to raise questions...
...The first volume, his collected scientific papers, appeared in 1972...
...Such a full program card for life is more overwhelming than liberating...
...This is especially important in his book, for there are no graphics or numerical tables of any kind...
...Though repetitious, at times badly written, needlessly conspiratorial, and often wrong, the book nonetheless offers an explanation of why the United States goes to war that seems to me to be impeccably correct...
...Scientific gadfly LEO SZILARD: HIS VERSION OF THE FACTS edited by Spencer R. Weart and Gertrud Weiss Szilard...
...The input and computational techniques for this electronic oracle were closely monitored by Congress, independent consultants, and various Federal agencies to insure its integrity...
...Barry Commoner has become a master of the rare but crucially needed art of communicating technical information to the layman...
...Most of the interviewees in Turning Points are in what she calls a "shuttle zone," cognizant of and exhilarated by the freedoms available to women who accept women's liberation, but afraid that to acknowledge feminism is to jeopardize their marriages...
...Initially the concern centered on the obvious possibility of a postwar nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union...
...A conflict between Debs's widow and his brother and long-time secretary Theodore Debs resulted in the loss to scholars of letters and other important records for many years...
...The PresiMark Northcross is director of the Center for Public Energy Planning, a San Francisco-based public interest energy consulting firm...
...aid to the new Lon Nol regime propped it up until its collapse five years later...
...This anthology, with its helpful, informed commentary and biography, is the best presentation of them...
...The principal failing of the book may be that Commoner really does not tell us how to get around these roadblocks...
...As Kissinger viewed the stalemated Vietnam war, a "victory by a third-rate communist peasant state over the United States" was intolerable...
...Recently some American historians have shown a tendency to repudiate the Turner thesis — Turnerism, as some call it — as the key to our national historical experience...
...Nixon is in forced retirement, but Kissinger continues to prowl the corridors of power in Washington, exerting influence while waiting to make a comeback...
...But to talk about them without considering the business interests that they speak for is to ignore a crucial aspect of history...
...They pressed the Johnson Administration for a green light, but the Administration, fearing the domestic repercussions of widening the war, resisted...
...The answer, I believe, is a unique prescience, a prescience in the service of humanity...
...But before Szilard and James Franck could present their memorandum, Roosevelt died...
...The Nixon Administration's extension of the war was a disaster for the people of Cambodia and the U.S...
...Commoner has a solution, but he soft-pedals it in his book...
...Excellent chapters on wheat farming in the plains states reveal not only Merk's native knowledge of that area, but a sound sense of the relationships, good and bad, between agriculture and technology...
...Westward frontiers HISTORY OF THE WESTWARD MOVEMENT by Frederick Merk Alfred A. Knopf...
...During 1977, when President Carter began his program to raise oil and natural gas prices in the guise of a national energy policy, his assistants solved the problem presented by the relative accuracy of the PIES model by dismantling the watchdog program where possible and otherwise manipulating the inputs to the model in favor of Carter's energy policy...
...Szilard was one of the group of Hungarian scientific emigres which included Edward Teller, John von Neumann, Michael Polyani, and Eugene Wigner...
...Their meeting with Byrnes was unfortunate...
...He considered their strictures on the interchange of infor54 / september 1979 mation among scientists counterproductive...
...In this study, based upon these papers and others from the great socialist's personal library, Bernard J. Brommel, a member of the board of the Debs Foundation, emphasizes the importance of Debs the rhetorician, of Debs the '' tongue of the working class...
...But aside from the S27,000 solar water heating system on the roof of the White House, Carter has done little to implement the third element...
...Massive U.S...
...military forces made secret forays into Cambodia in the mid-1960s in addition to tactical air strikes along the Vietnamese border...
...Some of the most interesting sections of Merk's book involve studies of the abuses of the land resulting from ignorance, lack of planning, or just plain greed which make clear the extent to which dust bowls, erosion, overgrazing, salinization of rivers, and similar ecological disasters are the direct result of the laissez-faire attitudes under which the frontiers were developed...
...The Politics of Energy is more than an indictment of Carter's energy program, and it is more than just another blueprint for an alternative energy future...
...Published posthumously, Merk's final encounter with the frontier is a fitting conclusion to a life spent in the service of one of America's great ideas...
...defeat in Indochina, events there have been deeply influenced by the superpower politics of China, the Soviet Union, and the United States...
...His essays, including his thesis on Thomas Paine, are of continuing interest to students of American life...
...There are numerous examples in this volume to document that observation...
...Though his book is not without its frontiersmen, politicians, heroes, and villains, they more often appear as pawns of forces greater than themselves than as shapers of events...
...Szilard was convinced that some system of controls could be developed if the urgency of the problem was brought to President Roosevelt's attention...
...At Chicago Szilard, the free spirit, the catalyst, the intellectual hustler, divided his time between working on technical problems and becoming the gadfly on the broad flanks of the military bureaucracy...
Vol. 43 • September 1979 • No. 9
